On one point he did venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed.

It appeared from Mrs.Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a Sandwich Montagu.

"Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day.

She was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had acquired no small reputation for ability and wit ....

She was, or affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the principal.