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CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LETTERS 91
guessed the nature of his offence, never realized
the beastliness of that moral and religious
humbug which to himself seems always to
have justified him in playing tyrant and
vampire to a woman of genius.
Ill
THE volumes before us, as we have hinted,
were expected, not without excitement, by
those people for whose benefit we are about
to review them. It must be confessed that
they have not wholly escaped the fate that
is apt to befall the progeny of parturient
mountains. Not that they are precisely what
Horace would have expected them to be :
they are anything but small ; yet, about
the contents there is something mousey
the colour perhaps. The fact is, they are
disappointing. The letters they contain a
bare third of which are by Jane Welsh
were all written between the middle of 1821
and the end of 1826 that is to say, before
either Jane or Carlyle had found themselves.
At his best, Carlyle was not a letter-writer ;
he was a clever man who wrote letters. These
have sometimes the personal quality of a
good essay, never the charm of familiar