stomach never so far wrong as he had imagined.... Afterwards he was always
impatient, moody, irritable, violent. These humours were in his nature, and
he could no more be separated from them than his body could leap off its
shadow.... He looked back to it as the happiest and wholesomest home that
he had ever known. He could do fully twice as much work there, he said, as
he could ever do afterwards in London."

"... If his liver occasionally troubled him, livers trouble most of us as
we advance in life, and his actual constitution was a great deal stronger
than that of ordinary men.... Why could not Carlyle, with fame and honor
and troops of friends, and the gates of a great career flung open before
him, and a great intellect and a conscience untroubled by a single act
which he need regret, bear and forget too? Why indeed! The only answer is
that Carlyle was Carlyle."

These observations carry weight as representing the impartial and judicial
estimate of a careful observer desiring only accurately to picture Carlyle
as he was. The only logical conclusion, it seems to me, was that Carlyle,
in addition to ocular defect with its legitimate consequences, was weighed
down by worry over the failure to realize his own exaggerated ideal of
health, that he devoted an undue degree of attention to this subject
and was unduly anxious about it--in other words, that he had decided
hypochondriacal tendencies.






VIII.