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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