After careful consideration of the worst of these remarks, Mrs.
Oliphant's explanation seems the true one; they are most of them
sparkling bits of Mrs. Carlyle's conversation. She, happily for
herself, had a lively wit, and, perhaps not so happily, a biting
tongue, and was, as Carlyle tells us, accustomed to make him laugh, as
they drove home together from London crushes, by far from genial
observations on her fellow-creatures, little recking--how should she?
--that what was so lightly uttered was being engraven on the tablets of
the most marvellous of memories, and was destined long afterwards to
be written down in grim earnest by a half-frenzied old man, and
printed, in cold blood, by an English gentleman.

The horrible description of Mrs. Irving's personal appearance, and the
other stories of the same connection, are recognised by Mrs. Oliphant
as in substance Mrs. Carlyle's; whilst the malicious account of Mrs.
Basil Montague's head-dress is attributed by Carlyle himself to his
wife. Still, after dividing the total, there is a good helping for
each, and blame would justly be Carlyle's due if we did not remember,
as we are bound to do, that, interesting as these three sketches are,
their interest is pathological, and ought never to have been given us.
Mr. Froude should have read them in tears, and burnt them in fire.
There is nothing surprising in the state of mind which produced them.
They are easily accounted for by our sorrow-laden experience. It is a
familiar feeling which prompts a man, suddenly bereft of one whom he
alone really knew and loved, to turn in his fierce indignation upon
the world, and deride its idols whom all are praising, and which yet
to him seem ugly by the side of one of whom no one speaks. To be angry
with such a sentence as 'scribbling Sands and Eliots, not fit to
compare with my incomparable Jeannie,' is at once inhuman and