"No, no," said Tennyson, with a sort of smile under his rough
beard. "It's much better that two people should be made unhappy
than four."

The world has pretty nearly come around to the verdict of the poet
laureate. It is not probable that Thomas Carlyle would have made
any woman happy as his wife, or that Jane Baillie Welsh would have
made any man happy as her husband.

This sort of speculation would never have occurred had not Mr.
Froude, in the early eighties, given his story about the Carlyles
to the world. Carlyle went to his grave, an old man, highly
honored, and with no trail of gossip behind him. His wife had died
some sixteen years before, leaving a brilliant memory. The books
of Mr. Froude seemed for a moment to have desecrated the grave,
and to have shed a sudden and sinister light upon those who could
not make the least defense for themselves.

For a moment, Carlyle seemed to have been a monster of harshness,
cruelty, and almost brutish feeling. On the other side, his wife
took on the color of an evil-speaking, evil-thinking shrew, who
tormented the life of her husband, and allowed herself to be
possessed by some demon of unrest and discontent, such as few
women of her station are ever known to suffer from.

Nor was it merely that the two were apparently ill-mated and
unhappy with each other. There were hints and innuendos which
looked toward some hidden cause for this unhappiness, and which
aroused the curiosity of every one. That they might be clearer,