And sure enough, I did stand by that dismal task with all my time
and all my means; day and night wrestling with it, as with the ugliest
dragon, which blotted out the daylight and the rest of the world to me
till I should get it slain."]
But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, that while
the assailants of a book sometimes read it, favourable reviewers hardly
ever do; these latter save their time by payment of generally superficial
praise, and a few random quotations.
Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being discharged of the
first instalment of his book: the remainder lay upon him like a menacing
nightmare; he never ceased to feel that the work must be completed ere he
could be free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never absent
from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite messages, and
childlike entreaties for her to "come and protect him," when she came
it was to find that they were better apart; for his temper was never
softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the
life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together
in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a
keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband,
"If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence
would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of
you, and how preoccupied you are when I do see you.
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