A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 241 



selfishness. Seeking his own ends, following his own 

 demon, St. Simeon certainly was ; but seeking his 

 ease or pleasure, or animated by any unworthy, igno- 

 ble purpose, he certainly was not. No more was 

 Carlyle, each one of whose books was a sort of 

 pillar of penitence or martyrdom atop of which he 

 wrought and suffered, shut away from the world, 

 renouncing its pleasures and prizes, wrapped in deep- 

 est gloom and misery, and wrestling with all manner 

 of real and imaginary demons and hindrances. Dur- 

 ing his last great work, the thirteen years spent in 

 his study at the top of his house, writing the history 

 of Frederick, this isolation, this incessant toil and 

 penitential gloom, were such as only religious devo- 

 tees have voluntarily 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, " in- 

 flamed to a fury of personality." He must of neces- 

 sity assert himself ; he is shot with great velocity ; 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 compan- 

 ion 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 wonder that 

 between two such persons living childless together 

 16 



