"Her life beside me, constantly writing here, is but a dull one; however, she seems to desire no other. . . . I tell her many times there is much for her to do, if she were trained for it,--her whole sex to deliver from the bondage of frivolity, dollhood, and imbecility, into the freedom of valor and womanhood." Of the solitude which had nearly killed his wife, he after a time wearied himself; and then he effected a change. One laughs to think of the second moving, and wonders if it was as bad as the first, which he thus described:-- "In this mansion we have had a battle like that of Saint George and the dragon. Neither are we yet conquerors. Smoke, and wet, and chaos! May the good Lord keep all Christian men from moving." If it seemed as bad as this to him, what did it seem to her, delicately reared and hating the disagreeables of life? Still she did not complain, but wrote to his mother about this time: "I could wish him a little less yellow, and a little more peaceable; otherwise he is perfect." And she soon learned, compelled to it possibly by dire necessity, to take upon herself all of the practical and prosaic part of the management of their affairs. It is painful, although it is also comical, to read of her domestic battles and defeats. She put infinite wit and talent into her descriptions of them in her letters to her friends, and the whole world has read them with smiles and tears; but they were not light troubles to her, as they would have been to many commonplace women. Probably upon a majority of wives, even if they have not men of genius for husbands, fall nearly as great a part of the domestic duties and cares as upon Mrs. Carlyle; yet few consider this a great hardship, and the sympathies of the world are not invoked in their behalf. It was not this so much in Mrs. Carlyle's case as it was the moodiness and fault-finding and general irascibility of the husband which aggravated everything, and made little things seem great. That her spirits were entirely gone and her whole vivacious nature changed at the end of the Craigenputtoch period is proved by sentences from her letters, To his mother she writes:-- "It is my husband's worst fault with me that I will not or cannot speak. Often when he has talked to me for an hour without answer, he will beg for some sign of life on my part, and all that I can give him is a little kiss."