When Miss Welsh, who was in love with Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment, and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of them.

If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him- and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her health with more solicitude.

He gave what he had to give.

He could not give what he had not.

"Of all the men whom I have ever seen," said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible.
If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and he howled.