CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA 
himself, but in 1868, when life ‘‘ in the valley of the shadow of 
Frederick the Great ’’? had become for her too dreary and mono- 
tonous, and she was haunted every day by the Prussian’s ghost, 
she went away to friends for a little change, and wrote, entreating 
Carlyle ‘‘ not to sit up till two, nor take a sixth cup of tea, nor 
commit any indiscretion in the management of himself.” And she 
had previously concluded another letter with: “Oh! please do 
go to bed at a reasonable hour, and don’t overwork yourself ; and 
consider you are no longer a child.’”’ All of which is both touching 
and amusing, for Carlyle at this time was sixty-eight. No wonder 
she was weary, for “‘ Frederick the Great ” took six years in which 
to get itself written—as ‘“‘ Cromwell” had taken five. In 1864, 
when the house would appear to have been redecorated, she writes 
charging him to “‘ tell the maids not to rub on the clean paper with 
their abominably large crinolines, and not to put back the chairs 
against it, as is their habit.” 
Mrs. Carlyle was, indeed, a notable housekeeper. She usually 
waited until she could get her husband away before she made an 
“earthquake ” in the house. She then set the girls “‘ raging and 
scrubbing,”’ and ordered all the feather beds and pillows out on to 
the grass to get aired. On one occasion after she had done so, it 
rained pretty continuously, and the beds only went out to come 
back again, ‘‘ having,” she wrote, “ all to retreat into the lobby, 
where they lie appealing to posterity.” 
Nero, the little dog, bulks largely in the annals of No. 5, Cheyne 
Row. ‘He is part and parcel of myself,” Mrs. Carlyle wrote to 
her husband. ‘‘ When I say ‘I am well,’ it means also ‘* Nero is 
well!’ Nero c’est moi, mot c’est Nero.” Perhaps all Mrs. Car- 
lyle’s friends did not share the passion for dogs which made Nero’s 
successor the innocent cause of his mistress’s death—for when she 
went from home on a visit, Nero had sometimes to be left behind— 
his dignity, like hers, must be kept up, and he should not go, she 
said, ‘‘ where he is de trop.” So Mr. Carlyle took what care he could 
of him in her absence; he liked the little animal well enough, 
but I think it was a case of ‘‘ love me, love my dog,” with him, for 
he said he was ‘“‘a real nuisance and absurdity in the house.” 
When she was seeking health in Scotland, Nero was wont to accom- 
pany him in his nocturnal rambles, and returned home, wrote 
Carlyle, ‘‘ the joyfullest, dirtiest little dog we may wish to see.” 
\ 267 
