Perhaps the way Carlyle and his wife pulled together is not so very uncommon. His mother used to say of him that he was "gey ill to live with," and Miss Welsh whom he married had a fiery temper. When provoked she "was as hard as a flint, with possibilities of dangerous sparks of fire." The pair seem to have tormented each other, but not half as much as each tormented him and herself. They were too like each other, suffering in the same way from nerves disordered, digestion impaired, excessive self-consciousness, and the absence of children to take their thoughts away from each other. They were, in the fullest sense of the word, everything to each other--both for good and evil, sole comforters, chief tormentors. The proverb "Ill to hae but waur to want" was true of the Carlyles as of many another couple. Sir David Baird and some other English officers, being captured by Tippo Saib, were confined for some time in one of the dungeons of his palace at Bangalore. When Sir David's mother heard the news in Scotland, referring to the method in which prisoners were chained together and to her son's well-known irascible temper, she exclaimed: "God pity the lad that's tied to our Davie." How much more to be pitied is he or she whom matrimony has tied for life to a person with a bad temper! Over-particularity in trifles causes a great deal of domestic discomfort. The husband or wife who, to use a common phrase, wishes a thing to be "just so," and not otherwise, is uncomfortable to pull with. For any person to be thoroughly amiable and livable with, there should be a little touch of untidiness and unpreciseness, and indifference to small things. A little spice--not too much--of the Irishman's spirit who said, "If you can't take things asy, take them as asy as you can." There is no more beautiful quality than that ideality which conceives and longs after perfection; but if too exclusively cultivated it may drag down rather than elevate its possessor. The faculty which is ever conceiving and desiring something better and more perfect must be modified in its action by good sense, patience, and conscience, otherwise it induces a morbid, discontented spirit, which courses through the veins of individual and family life like a subtle poison. Exactingsness is untrained ideality, and much domestic misery is caused by it. A little bit of conscience makes the exacting person sour. He fusses, fumes, finds fault, and scolds because everything is not perfect in an imperfect world. Much more happy and good is he whose conceptions and desire of excellence are equally strong, but in whom there is a greater amount of discriminating common-sense.