Poor Mrs. Carlyle was much to be pitied, not for any wrong that he did her, but because she was one of those people who make themselves wretched and pass on their misery to those near them. My aunt was one of those sympathetic people to whom others carry their troubles, and Mrs. Carlyle spared her not a moan. Carlyle’s self-reproaches after her death were a delusion, born of her own shrewish complaints, which in his sorrow he schooled himself into believing to be well founded. That she was not an easy woman to live with is shown by the fact that she had been just as cantankerous with her mother at home as she was afterwards with her husband. Her letters to him are the witnesses of that. In society Mrs. Carlyle certainly shone. Her conversation was bright, witty and stimulating, but when she went home to the privacy of her journal, thanks to Froude’s indiscretion, we see another woman. She was ready enough to accept favours and hospitality from great people; then she would hie back to Cheyne Row and write down little petty unkindnesses about them. To a house where she had been received with much cordiality she was invited with other friends to go and see the bridal trousseau of one of the daughters; out comes the journal, and with fluent pen she gives her friends full measure of spiteful satire because the linen is marked with a coronet. Perhaps she would have found equal fault had the coronet been omitted. She was in her inmost heart a discontented woman in whom the milk of human kindness had been turned sour by praise that was not always destined for her alone, and she had been much encouraged by her friend Miss Jewsbury, the novelist, a very clever woman whom I sometimes met and did not like. Much is said in Froude’s volumes about Mrs. Carlyle’s beauty. When I knew her she was an elderly, even an old woman, but I could see no trace of good looks—and people who had known her when she was young laughed at the idea. However, love is blind, and in Carlyle’s eyes she was all that is beautiful. If it be true that in her youth she had so many suitors, it must have been her wit, and perhaps the _beauté du diable_, that attracted them. When the end came in 1881 and the lovable wise old man died full of honour, Chelsea, and yet not Chelsea alone, mourned his loss. It was sad to think that we should never again see the lonely, pathetic figure in his long brown coat and soft hat slouching along swiftly, stick in hand, with his peculiar shuffling gait. His face was a picture of hale old age with its ruddy cheeks streaked like a russet apple, and his strong white hair and crisp beard. It was a figure that might have stepped out of a painting by Raeburn, a thing of the past with a nobility which was all its own—the sturdy, rugged independence of the northern peasant. Everybody in the Village of Palaces knew him, and everybody was proud of him.