370 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 



years she would have condemned some of the utter- 

 ances of her earlier ones. As time passed she grew 

 more and more mellow and tender — more and more 

 into the form and texture of the wife needed by Car- 

 lyle. Had she lived a little longer his self-reproaches 

 would never have been heard. 1 Let me, however, for- 

 sake surmises and return to facts. He had laid his 

 wife in Haddington Churchyard. The summer had 

 passed, and harsh, dark winter was approaching. To 

 spend the winter in Cheyne Row with all its associations 

 was more than he could be expected to bear. But what 

 was to be done ? A loving answer to this question 



1 There was a fund of tenderness and liberality in Mrs. Carlyle ; 

 but her sarcasm could, on occasion, bite like nitric acid. Like her 

 husband, she could hit off a character or peculiarity with a simple 

 stroke of the tongue. Her stories sparkled with wit and humour. 

 It may be an old yarn, but she caused me to shake with laughter 

 by her inimitable way of telling the story of an old French priest, 

 who discoursed to his peasant congregation on Samson's feat of 

 tying the foxes' tails together, and sending them with burning 

 brands through the standing corn. The ruin to agricultural produce 

 was described so vividly, and with such local and domestic applica- 

 tions, that the people burst into weeping. Their sobs and tears 

 reacted on the old priest himself. He also fell to weeping, but 

 tried to assuage the general grief by calling out, * Ne pleurez pas, 

 mes enfants. Ne pleurez pas ; ce n'est pas vrai ! ' Her voice was 

 exquisitely comic as she to]d this story. The only intimation that I 

 ever had of past unhappiness on her part was given during an even- 

 ing visit when I found her alone. She then told me that some years 

 previously she had kept a journal, in which, to relieve her mind, she 

 wrote down her most secret thoughts and feelings. She condemned, 

 as she spoke to me, this habit of introspection. One day she had 

 left the book upon her desk, and on returning to her room, found 

 there a visitor actually looking into the journal. He probably re- 

 garded it as a mere library book ; but her wrath and rage, on finding 

 savings and sentiments intended for her eye alone, and kept secret 

 even from Carlyle, thus pried into, were uncontrollable. As she 

 spoke to me her anger seemed to revive, and its potency could not 

 be doubted. When I quitted her, I carried away the impression 

 that her maturer judgment had caused her to regard these journal 

 entries as the foolish utterances of a too sen itive past. 



