radiant as well as interesting. But on the whole, it is the gipsy queen whom we see in her,—the wild, lively queen whose mission it was to bring order out of chaos by the help of her fine genius for "details"-who fascinated most men's hearts, but smarted under her inferiority to a choicer type of queenhood, and who chafed bitterly against the sense of imprisonment which the constant society of such a man as Carlyle necessarily imposed on a character so full of vivacity, and so eager to feel the consciousness of its own power. Such is the picture impressed on the mind by the perusal of Mrs. Carlyle's frank, charming, playful, and bitter letters, eloquent now with tenderness, and now, again, with impatient wrath and a mortification hardly rising to the point of scorn.

BIOGRAPHY IN MORTMAIN

MRS. OLIPHANT and Mr. Venables both take up the cudgels against Mr. Froude in current numbers of the May magazines,—Mr. Venables in the Fortnightly, and Mrs. Oliphant in the Contemporary,— both intimating that Mr. Froude has done his duty very ill, and is responsible for representing the relation between Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle as much less satisfactory than it really was. For my own part, I have done my best to show that the public impression on this head was very hasty, and that for a very large part of her life, at least, Mrs. Carlyle was obviously as devoted as a wife as she was brilliant as a woman. But apart from the question as to the proper inferences to be drawn from the facts, I must say that Mrs. Oliphant, whose very vigorous attack on Mr. Froude is much the more formidable of the two, has not at all sufficiently weighed what was Mr. Carlyle's share of this responsibility and what was Mr. Froude's. She writes as if the publication of the fragment of diary rested on Mr. Froude's sole responsibility, whereas, as I understand Mr. Froude, Mr. Carlyle had himself selected for publication a part, and a most painful part, of the diary, though affording no clue to the bitterness of Mrs. Carlyle's tone.

"A part only of the following extracts," says Mr. Froude in giving extracts from the diary, "was selected by Mr. Carlyle, a part sufficient merely to leave a painful impression, without explaining the origin of his wife's discomfort." Mrs. Oliphant represents it as if no part of the bitter diary of 1855-56 had been selected by Mr. Carlyle at all, but only fragments of letters which seemed to demand explanation, and that Mr. Froude had out of his head hunted up the diary to expose the black spot in the relations between husband and wife. If I have understood the matter rightly this is not so. Mr. Froude is, indeed, I suppose, responsible for obtaining and publishing the indiscreet and highly-coloured letter from Miss Jewsbury, with which the extracts from the diary conclude, and is also responsible, I suppose, for some extension of the extracts taken from the diary, but notso I understand what seems to me his explicit statement for authorising the publication of passages which reveal the blackness of desolation in which Mrs. Carlyle was sunk at the time this diary was written. It is quite another question, of course, whether Mr. Carlyle was not exceeding greatly the right of a husband in authorising, without her consent, the publication of passages which could not but draw public attention to the bitterness of soul in which his wife at one time seemed to be lost,-passages which, I am well inclined to believe, with Mrs. Oliphant, that Mrs. Carlyle herself would never have written had she thought it possible that they would one day see the light. But if we are to blame any one, let us at least blame fairly, and not make Mr. Froude the whipping-boy on whom to vent all our indignation.

It seems to me that Mr. Froude has responsibilities enough to answer for. He has to answer for the literary reduplications which have extended what would have made two charming volumes of unique letters into three volumes of letters abounding in repetitions and monotonies. He is responsible for inviting Miss Jewsbury to add an evidently overcoloured and ex parte criticism to the most painful part of the correspondence. He is responsible, as I understand him, for revealing the explanation of Mrs. Carlyle's darkest moods-the indignation which she felt at the intellectual charm exercised over her husband by Lady Harriet Baring. But he is not responsible for revealing the fact that these moods were at one time very dark. Mr. Carlyle himself, apparently as a sort of penance, had given his sanction deliberately to this revelation, and had heard with satisfaction that Mr. Froude acquiesced in that decision. So I understand the case. And, therefore, Mr. Froude's responsibility appears to me to consist of three distinct elements

(1) Responsibility for not dissuading Mr. Carlyle from an act of questionable penance, but rather confirming him him in it; (2) Responsibility for bringing out the secret of Mrs. Carlyle's desolation. of heart, instead of leaving it a riddle to the public; (3) Responsibility for darkening the picture by adding Miss Jewsbury's comments. I confess that I think the first of these decisions the most serious of the three, and the second much the soundest of the three exercises of discretion-not a mistake at all, granting that the first course had been irrevocably decided on; while the third seems to me an unquestionable mistake of secondary importance. I do not think that if any evidence of the

darker moods which beset Mrs. Carlyle during some years of her life were to have been given at all, it would have been wise or fair to Mr. Carlyle to leave them unexplained. The public imagination is none too charitable in such matters, and while I think it certain that before very long the spirit in which this temporary alienation of feeling between Mrs. Carlyle and her husband is judged will not be very harsh, I do not know what might not have been the inferences drawn if Mr. Froude had left extracts from the diary showing us Mrs. Carlyle in her misery, and had not afforded us any explanation. As for Miss Jewsbury's comments, they seem unquestionably to make matters worse than they really were, and, therefore, they should have been rejected. But they are so obviously inconsistent with some of the facts, that they will not exercise any lasting influence on the estimate of either Mr. or Mrs. Carlyle. It is clear, however, that Mrs. Oliphant minimises excessively when she represents these moods of Mrs. Carlyle as SO transient that on turning a few pages you may always come again on the old affectionate language. I believe that for some years, at least, the tone of Mrs. Carlyle's letters remains more or less proud and frigid, and that you must turn very many pages at some parts of the book before you can find any trace of the old playful affectionateness and fondness.

To my mind, the primary blunder which Mr. Froude made was in not dissuading Mr. Carlyle from the ill-judged act of penance which, unless I mistake Mrs. Carlyle's nature altogether, she would herself so strenuously have disapproved and condemned, and so certainly have prevented had she