On another occasion, writing to her husband's mother, she says:--"You have others behind and I have only him--only him in the whole wide world to love me and take care of me--poor little wretch that I am. Not but that numbers of people love me, after their fashion, far more than I deserve, but then his fashion is so different from theirs, and seems alone to suit the crotchety creature that I am." And then her pride in her husband is well exemplified by an experience related in a letter to him, which shows also how wide and deep is that mysterious impersonal influence of great authors on men who are totally unknown to them:--"A man of the people mounted the platform and spoke; a youngish, intelligent-looking man, who alone, of all the speakers, seemed to understand the question, and to have feelings as well as notions about it. He spoke with a heart-eloquence that left me warm. I never was more affected by public speaking.... A sudden thought struck me: this man would like to know you. I would give him my address in London. I borrowed a piece of paper and handed him my address. When he looked at it he started as if I had sent a bullet into him, caught my hand, and said, 'Oh, it is your husband! Mr Carlyle has been my teacher and master! I have owed everything to him for years and years!' I felt it a credit to you really to have had a hand in turning out this man, was prouder of that heart-tribute to your genius than any amount of reviewers' praises or aristocratic invitations to dinner." It is because the spirit which breathes in the words of this young workman has been the guiding moral force of numbers of men and women in all stations of life, during the last sixty years, that I have devoted so much space to Carlyle. It is of the greatest importance to literature that the man whose eloquent preaching of justice, sincerity, and reverence has turned the hearts of thousands of his fellowmen towards nobility and simplicity of life, should not himself have been out of harmony with all that he taught. "The world," says Thackeray's gifted daughter, "has pointed its moral finger of late at the old man in his great old age, accusing himself in the face of all, and confessing the overpowering irritations which the suffering of a lifetime had laid upon him and upon her he loved. That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with an ill-temper and a tender heart, and a racking imagination, speaking from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of passionate remorse which few among us dare to face, seems to some of us now a figure nobler and truer, a teacher greater far than in the days when all his pain and love and remorse were still hidden from us all."[14]