knew—or if he did not know it was not for want of telling—that discontent with the existing order of things might be traceable to some merely physical cause, some pressure on the brain, some disorder of the liver, some acrid humour in the blood, that poisoned the springs of energy. His own temper was naturally passionate, and his gouty habit, with all which that involves when the subject is gathering up for an illness, did not, of course, tend to make him less irritable. That in spite of this his temper sweetened with years was due to an amount of self-control which it is very easy for natures more phlegmatic or of more perfect physical balance to under-estimate. How sane, how full of ordinary common sense his view of such things was, is illustrated by that other letter, one of his rare excursions into literary criticism. Even here the criticism passes almost at once, and almost insensibly, into the larger sphere of a criticism of life.
"Last night I took me a book and read Carlyle on Mrs. Carlyle, having read his James Carlyle and Jeffrey before. I think I never read anything that dispirited me so much; though read it through one must after having once begun it. What is one to say of such outrageous blues as this? As to what he says about this, that, and the other person now living, I can't see that he gives much offence, I mean to say personally; he is generally very unfair and narrow and whimsical about his likes and dislikes, but 'tis something in these days of hypocrisy that he makes distinctions at all—only one wishes his distinctions were something more than whims. But all that is nothing to the ferocity of his gloom; I confess I had no idea of it till I read the book: and yet I find it difficult to say that it ought not to have been printed, and I am sure it ought not to have been garbled, as some folk think it should.
