Let us look a little at this hero's domestic life. What was its foundation, what its outcome? That there was something wrong at the foundation seems to be clear. And it was not so much the fact that neither party married the first choice of the heart,--though it is true that Jane Welsh loved with all the ardor of her nature Edward Irving first, and that Carlyle undoubtedly would have married his first love, the fair and amiable Margaret Gordon, the original of Blumine in "Sartor Resartus," had not poverty prevented,--but rather was it their unsuitability to each other. She was a lady, delicately reared, and with a taste for society and the refinements of life; with a love for admiration, too, and a wish to shine in her little sphere. He was a peasant, coarsely bred, and scorning the amenities of life to which he was unaccustomed,--scorning, too, the chivalric feeling with which better bred men look upon women and treat their wives. He told her this, bluntly and brutally, before marriage. They two were to be one, and he that one. He had the peasant idea of being master, and to the end of his days held fast to it. They were never, to his mind, equals, but he was the chief and she the subject. This was what put her down intellectually. In her youth she had literary tastes and ambitions, and doubtless much ability; but after marriage we hear no more of that. Even in the seven years at Craigenputtoch, when one would think that out of sheer weariness and want of occupation she would have written or studied, we hear nothing of any such attempts. Her married life seems to have quenched all this utterly. Then all the domestic drudgery, which to her seemed such a burden, and appears to have afflicted her to the end of life, seemed to him to be the natural and proper thing for a woman. He had all his life been accustomed to see his mother and sisters at their tasks, naturally and uncomplainingly, and he could never understand why all women should not feel in the same way. Then he was fond of solitude, and looked upon a visitor as an emissary of the devil; and he failed to see that a gay, pleasure-loving, volatile, sparkling girl could not share his feelings. So he shut her up remorselessly,--never dreaming that he was cruel. That she was fond of admiration was nothing to him, though he was fond of it himself in his own grim way; _he_ was the central figure of this household, and if she was deprived of a natural enjoyment it seemed a trifle to him. In short, their whole philosophy of life was different, their characters unsuited to each other, and their tempers of the order described as "difficult." It is not necessary to blame one or the other entirely for what followed. He saw everything in one light, she in another; what but disappointment and unrest could ensue?