feeling of his heart.  He was at bottom a sincerely kind man, and his servants were devoted to him.  But he was troublesome in small matters; irritable, nervous, and dyspeptic.  His books harassed him like illnesses, and he groaned under the infliction.  If he were disturbed when he was working, he lost all self-control, and his wife felt, she said, as if she were keeping a private mad-house.  It was not quite so private as it might have been, for Mrs. Carlyle found in her grievances abundant food for her sarcastic tongue.  Whatever she talked about she made interesting, and her relations with her husband became a common subject of gossip.  It was said that the marriage had never been a real one, that they were only companions, and so forth.  Froude was content to enjoy the society of the most gifted couple in London without troubling himself to solve mysteries which did not concern him.

Thrifty as she was, Mrs. Carlyle was not fitted by physical strength and early training to be the wife of a poor man.  She was too anxious a housekeeper, and worried herself nervously about trifles.  Her father had been a country doctor, not rich, but able to keep the necessary servants.  In Carlyle’s home there were no servants at all.  His father was a mason, and the work of the house was done by the family.  Why should his wife be in a different position from his mother’s?  There was no reason, in the nature of things.  But custom is very strong, and the early years of Mrs. Carlyle’s married life were a hard struggle against grinding poverty.  Carlyle was grandly indifferent to material things.  He wanted no luxuries, except tobacco and a horse.  He would not have altered his message to mankind, or his mode of delivering it, for the wealth of the Indies.  What he had to say he said, and men might take it or leave it as they thought proper.  He never swerved from the path of integrity.  He did not know his way to the house of Rimmon.  The mere practical ability required to produce such a book as Frederick the Great might have realised a fortune in business.  Carlyle just made enough money to live in decent and wholesome comfort.

From the first Carlyle’s conversation attracted Froude, and dazzled him.  But he felt, as others felt, that submission rather than intimacy was the attitude which it suggested or compelled.  There was no republic of letters in Carlyle’s house.  It was a dictatorship, pure and simple.  What the dictator condemned was heresy.  What he did not know was not knowledge.  Mill was a poor feckless driveller.  Darwin was a pretentious sciolist.  Newman had the intellect of a rabbit.  Herbert Spencer was “the most unending ass in Christendom.”  “Scribbling Sands and Eliots” were unfit to tie Mrs. Carlyle’s shoe-strings.  Editing Keats was “currying dead dog.”  Ruskin could only point out the correggiosity of Correggio.  Political economy was the dismal science, or the gospel according to McCrowdie.* Carlyle’s eloquent and humourous diatribes were wonderful, laughter-moving, awe-compelling.  They did not put his hearers at their ease, and Froude felt more admiration than sympathy.