[38] After reading the above estimate in the proof sheets, Professor Masson writes to me as follows:-- 'May I hint that, in the passage about his character and domestic relations, you seem hardly to do justice to the depths of real kindness and tenderness in him, and the actual _couthiness_ of his manner and fireside conversation in his most genial hours? He was delightful and loveable at such hours, with a fund of the raciest Scottish humour.' This is a side of Carlyle's nature which would naturally be hidden from the general reader, and from Mr Froude. It is easy to imagine how Carlyle's genial humour, frozen at its source in the company of the solemnly pessimistic Froude, should be thawed by the presence of 'a brither Scot.' CHAPTER VII LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF CARLYLE In presence of the pathetically tragic spectacle of Carlyle in his old age, who can have the heart to enter into his domestic life and weigh with pedantic scales the old man's blameworthiness? Carlyle survived his wife fifteen years. His brother John, himself a widower, was anxious that they should live together, but it was otherwise arranged. John returned to Scotland, and Carlyle remained alone in Cheyne Row. He was prevailed on to visit Ripple Court, near Walmer, and on his return to London he wrote, 'My home is very gaunt and lonesome; but such is my allotment henceforth in this world. I have taken loyally to my vacant circumstances, and will try to do my best with them.' Carlyle's first public appearance after his sore bereavement was as chairman of the Eyre Committee as a protest against Governor Eyre's recall. 'Poor Eyre!' he wrote to a correspondent, 'I am heartily sorry for him, and for the English nation, which makes such a dismal fool of itself. Eyre, it seems, has fallen suddenly from £6000 a year into almost zero, and has a large family and needy kindred dependent on him. Such his reward for saving the West Indies, and hanging one incendiary mulatto, well worth the gallows, if I can judge.'