GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
wife, ‘‘ not to walk, but to take water and ascrub-brush and swash 
down into some degree of tolerability those greasy, clammy flags 
in the back area. I did it without rebuke of Anne. I said she 
couldn’t do it in her present state of illness, and on the whole 
proceeded, and found it decidedly hard work, for three-quarters 
of an hour. Some ten or twelve pails of water with vigorous 
scrubbing did, however, reduce the affair to order, whereupon I 
washed myself and sat down to breakfast in virtuous peace. ‘ Dirt 
shall not be around me,’ said Cobbett, ‘so long as I can handle a 
broom.’ ” 
It is a pity that Carlyle did not always turn to violent exercise 
of this sort, instead of losing his temper and making his unselfish, 
clever, but fiery little wife uncomfortable, when things went 
wrong; and when cocks and hens, street organs, and neighbours’ 
pianos, interrupted his work and his rest. 
But he did not; and therefore it is tragi-comic to read the com- 
ments of both husband and wife in their letters, on the painful 
subject of the ‘‘ demon fowls.”” Tragic that a man of genius should 
be so disturbed and no redress be obtainable, comic as to the cause, 
which was a “‘ two-and-sixpenny worth of bantams.’’ Comic, too, 
in the theatrical deduction that ‘‘ The cocks must either withdraw 
or die!’’ He would, indeed, have cheerfully shot them, but he had 
no gun, and could not have hit themif he had had one—the more so, 
as he says, he “‘ seldom saw the wretched animals,”’ because they 
were just on the other side of the garden wall, and the pear tree 
intervened. If the reader will look at the picture of the garden 
and back of the house, he will realize the absurdities of the position 
proposed. The author of “ Sartor,’ with a blunderbuss, taking 
aim from his bedroom window at a moving quarry! But the 
matter was serious enough, in all conscience, for the birds were so 
very close, and they ‘‘ screeched,” and they ‘‘ crowed” from 
midnight to morn. ‘‘ What is to be done?” wrote Mrs. Carlyle 
to her mother. ‘‘ God knows, if this goes on he will soon be in 
Bedlam, and I too. . . .”’. She wrote piteous appeals to the next- 
door neighbours, but they were returned unopened. She sent 
for the maid, but she would not come. In the law there was no 
help. ‘‘ People,” she wrote, ‘‘ may keep wild beasts in their back 
yard if they care to do so.” This was in 1842, and the annoyance 
seems to have gone on with intervals for twenty years, alternating 
264 
