CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 



the back was carefully tended, and her own dress was always 

 tasteful. She had been born into a refined home, a home that 

 she was well fitted to adorn, whereas he was a peasant-farmer's 

 son. " But, though unpolished," says Froude, "he was a gentle- 

 man in every fibre, never to be mistaken for anything else." 

 Though he professed to be unsociable, when he went into company, 

 although he might suffer from sleeplessness and indigestion after- 

 wards he received, as well as gave, pleasure, for he was one of the 

 best of living talkers : " Wise, tender, scornful, humorous, as the 

 inclination took him." 



If his dislike to society was a pose, he could drop it when the 

 occasion demanded. As early as 1839, when his mother-in-law, 

 Mrs. Welsh, was staying at Cheyne Row, he, writing to his own 

 mother, good-humouredly describes how " Jane audaciously got 

 up a thing called a soiree one evening ... it really went off in 

 a most successful manner, though at midnight 4 I ' smoked a 

 peaceable pipe, praying it might be long before we saw the like 

 again." 



Mrs. Carlyle was charming, witty, brilliant, but had a hasty 

 temper, and a tongue that could sting. " Do you know, Mrs. 

 Carlyle, you would be vastly more amiable if you were not so 

 damnably clever," said the elder Sterling once to her ; and Carlyle 

 wrote on one occasion : " Thanks, thanks to thee, my good wife 

 though very hot-tempered one." 



But it was a case of " the pot calling the kettle black." His 

 own nervous irritability was excessive ; he was bilious, dyspeptic, 

 a bad sleeper, and acutely, even abnormally, sensitive to sounds. 

 A barking dog, a crowing cock, were his betes noires, and the sound 

 of a piano next door, in his hours of work, drove him nearly dis- 

 tracted. In this respect many of us can sympathize with him, 

 and he certainly seems to have suffered more than his share from 

 this sort of nerve-racking, and unnecessary annoyance ; and 

 though his mother, for whom he cherished the warmest filial affec- 

 tion, described him as " Gi ill to deal wi'," his was no case of chronic 

 bad temper, and in his happier moods he was a most charming 

 companion : but through lack of self-restraint, he was often given 

 to express himself in extravagant language (" London," for example, 

 " was an accursed, dirty, deafening distraction of cockney dom "). 

 Happily his own very keen sense of humour sometimes saved the 



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