GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



garden. They are both articulate, and inarticulate. First there 

 are the master and mistress, who are indeed highly articulate ; 

 secondly, the little dumb pet Nero ; and thirdly, more mistily and 

 changefully, the maid- servant for the time being. The servant 

 problem would seem to have been almost as acute and difficult 

 in the mid- Victorian era as during the social upheaval of a great 

 war, and the Carlyles had a vast and trying experience of maids- 

 of-all-work. "Anne," " Sarah," " Little Charlotte," and "Big 

 Charlotte," the former a worshipper of Mrs. Carlyle, follow one 

 another with bewildering rapidity. There was a simple-looking 

 Scottish lassie, who did not know her work, but who had a pleasing 

 physiognomy, and therefore might be teachable, but was not, 

 and who, moreover, after two days, broke forth into " bottomless 

 lying," and drank the cream on the way up to the drawing-room. 

 While Mrs. Carlyle was telling her husband of her delinquencies, 

 the charwoman burst in with the information that " our simpleton 

 was off at 10 p.m., bag and baggage, plus a sovereign that had just 

 been advanced to her." 



In 1860, when the lean times were over, Mrs. Carlyle set up a 

 second servant, but said it was just like " taking lodgers into one's 

 lower story. Often in the dead of night I am seized with a wild 

 desire to clear the house of these new-comers ; and take back my 

 own little Charlotte, who is still hanging on at her mother's in a 

 wild hope that one or other of them may break down, and she be 

 reinstated in her place." Mrs. Carlyle's bright letters when from 

 home to this young girl, who became cook-general at No. 5 in 1858, 

 when she was only fifteen, have recently been discovered and 

 published. 



" Oh, little woman, little woman ! I wonder how you get on 

 there all by yourself in that highly-genteel seven-roomed house 

 (as the retired cheesemonger would describe it). . . . Tell Nero, 

 with my dear love, that I fervently hope he is not overeating 

 himself! and to the sparrow .give in my name a good-sized 

 worm ! ' : She warns her against " a certain person who is always 

 at the elbow of an idle girl," to which the maid replies : " Me and 

 Nero are quite well and happy . . . the sparrow is doing very well, 

 and, Dear Madam, I will do my best to keep that certain person 

 at a distance from my elbow." 



Mrs. Carlyle does not, it is true, warn her husband not to overeat 



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