devotedly, and never forgotten or cast out.  And as to Mrs. Carlyle, I suppose it was impossible to be near her and not to love her!  This comes out in glimpses in her sad pathological letters.  There is a scene she describes, how she returned home after some long and serious bout of illness, when her cook and housemaid rushed into the street, kissed her, and. wept on her neck; while two of her men friends, Mr. Cooke and Lord Houghton, who called in the course of the evening, to her surprise and obvious pleasure, did the very same.  The result on myself, after reading the books, is to feel myself one of the circle, to want to do something for them, to wring the necks of the cocks who disturbed Carlyle’s sleep; and sometimes, alas, to rap the old man’s fingers for his blind inconsiderateness and selfishness.  I came the other day upon a passage in a former book of my own, where I said something sneering and derisive about the pair, and I felt deep shame and contrition for having written it—­and, more than that, I felt a sort of disgust for the fact that I have spent so much time in writing fiction.  Books like the Life of Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle’s Letters take the wind out of one’s imaginative faculties altogether, because one is confronted with the real stuff of life in them.  Life, that hard, stubborn, inconclusive, inconsistent, terrible thing!  It is, of course, that very hardness and inconclusiveness that makes one turn to fiction.  In fiction, one can round off the corners, repair mistakes, comfort, idealise, smooth things down, make error and weakness bear good fruit, choose, develop as one pleases.  Not so with life, where things go from bad to worse, misunderstandings grow and multiply, suffering does not purge, sorrow does not uplift.  That is the worst of fiction, that it deludes one into thinking that one can deal gently with life, finish off the picture, arrange things on one’s own little principles; and then, as in my own case, life brings one up against some monstrous, grievous, intolerable fact, that one can neither look round or over, and the scales fall from one’s eyes.  With what courage, tranquillity or joy is one to meet a thoroughly disagreeable situation?  The more one leans on the hope that it may amend, the weaker one grows; the thing to realise is that it is bad, that it is inevitable, that it has arrived, and to let the terror and misery do their worst, soak into the soul and not run off it.  Only then can one hope to be different; only so can one climb the weary ladder of patience and faith.

March 28, 1889.

Low-hung ragged grey skies, heaven smeared with watery vapours fleeting, broken and mournful, from the west—­these above me, as I stand by the old lichened gate of the high wind-swept field at the top of the wold.  In front a stretch of rough common, the dark-brown heather, the young gorse, bluish-green, the rusty red of soaked bracken, the pale ochre-coloured grass, all blent into a rich tint that pleases the eye with