A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW 221 



wrought and suffered, shut away from the world, 

 renouncing its pleasures and prizes, wrapped in 

 deepest gloom and misery, and wrestling with all 

 manner of real and imaginary demons and hin- 

 drances. During his last great work, — the thir- 

 teen years spent in his study at the top of his 

 house, writing the history of Frederick, — this iso- 

 lation, this incessant toil and penitential gloom, 

 were such as only religious devotees have volun- 

 tarily imposed upon themselves. 



If Carlyle was "ill to live with," as his mother 

 said, it was not because he was selfish. He was 

 a man, to borrow one of Emerson's early phrases, 

 "inflamed to a fury of personality." He must of 

 necessity assert himself; he is shot with great velo- 

 city; he is keyed to an extraordinary pitch; and it 

 was this, this raging fever of individuality, if any 

 namable trait or quality, rather than anything lower 

 in the scale, that often made him an uncomfortable 

 companion and neighbor. 



And it may be said here that his wife had the 

 same complaint, and had it bad, the feminine form 

 of it, and without the vent and assuagement of it 

 that her husband found in literature. Little won- 

 der that between two such persons, living childless 

 together for forty years, each assiduously cultivat- 

 ing their sensibilities and idiosyncrasies, there 

 should have been more or less frictions. Both 

 sarcastic, quick-witted, plain-spoken, sleepless, ad- 

 dicted to morphia and blue-pills, nerves all on the 

 outside; the wife without any occupation adequate 



