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At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme for "rhinoceros," and for Tennyson's diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were found for "Ecclefechan" and "Craigenputtock." But in rhyming ingenuity Browning is inferior to the author of "Hudibras," in a rhymer's elegant effrontery he is inferior to the author of "Don Juan."
She had put aside all immediate thought of London and its lures; she was going to cast in her lot with Carlyle's, largely as a matter of calculation, and believing that she had made the better choice. She was twenty-six and Carlyle was thirty-two when, after a brief residence in Edinburgh, they went down to Craigenputtock.
In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could be more readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote what must seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History of the French Revolution.
They felt, too, that Carlyle was too much absorbed with his own thought to be trusted with the charge of a high-spirited woman. However, the decision had been made, and the newly married couple went to Craigenputtock, with wagons that carried their household goods and those of Carlyle's brother, Alexander, who lived in a cottage near by.
The completion of his 80th year in 1875 was made the occasion of many tributes of respect and veneration, including a gold medal from some of his Scottish admirers. He d. on February 5, 1881. Burial in Westminster Abbey was offered, but he had left instructions that he should lie with his kindred. He bequeathed the property of Craigenputtock to the Univ. of Edin.
Carlyle's little property of Craigenputtock, which, in a letter to Goethe, he described as "the loneliest nook in Britain, six miles removed from anyone likely to visit me," and there they lived for about six years. Carlyle subsisted during this period by writing for a number of reviews, including the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the Foreign Quarterly, and Fraser's Magazine.
But he took no pains to show his love in those tender though trivial devotions that mean so much to the sensitive wife. During the first few years of their married life, they lived in a lonely place and had but a scant income. We have a very interesting picture of their life at Craigenputtock. Thomas could not eat bakers' bread, so Jeannie baked. The one servant they had was not competent.
The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he to work at his Diderot, doing justice to a character more alien to his own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to complete the essay; then at Count Cagliostro, also for Fraser, a link between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils.
It would not listen to him when he spoke from a far-off wilderness. So he made the great plunge, and saying good-by to the quiet of barren rock and moorland he came to live in London. He took a house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea, and this for the rest of his life was his home. But at first London was hardly less lonely than Craigenputtock.
Carlyle put his soul into these miscellanies, and the labor and enjoyment of writing made him partially forget his ailments. I look upon those years at Craigenputtock as the brightest and healthiest of his life, removed as he was from the sight of levities and follies which tormented his soul and irritated his temper.
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