" Carlyle answers in
his touching strain, "We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much
bad road. Oh, forgive me!" and sends her beautiful descriptions; but her
disposition, not wholly forgiving, received them somewhat sceptically.
"Byron," said Lady Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it";
and Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her "harsh spouse" that his fine
passages were very well written for the sake of future biographers:
a charge he almost indignantly repudiates. He was then, August 1860,
staying at Thurso Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair; a visit that
terminated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden change of
plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stanleys at Alderley,
being driven back to Chelsea and deprived of her promised pleasure and
requisite rest with her friends in the north.
The frequency of such incidents,--each apart capable of being palliated
by the same fallacy of division that has attempted in vain to justify the
domestic career of Henry VIII.,--points to the conclusion of Miss Gully
that Carlyle, though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as
if he were "totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so that she
received medical advice not to be much at home when he was in the stress
of writing. In January 1858 he writes to his brother John an anxious
letter in reference to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of
which she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of the disease
which ultimately proved fatal; but he was not sufficiently impressed
to give due heed to the warning; nor was it possible, with his
long-engrained habits, to remove the Marah spring that lay under all the
wearisome bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence.
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