No such frightful place' was the verdict of Jane
after she had been installed some three months
at Craigenputtock. 'The solitude' she went on
in a letter to Bessy Stodart 'is not so irksome as one
might think. If we are cut off from good society, we are
also delivered from bad; the roads are less pleasant to
walk on than the pavement of Princes Street, but we have
horses to ride, and, instead of shopping and making calls,
I have bread to bake and chickens to hatch. I read and
work, and talk with my husband, and never weary.' On
these horses we must pause for a moment.

Carlyle had alluded to the precarious health of his wife
in his home-letters from Edinburgh, and had hoped that
riding 'a smart pony' would make her fit again. Accord-
ing to his latest biographer, however, the last medical
evidence available during her lifetime suggested to her
doctors 'that, from her early teens, she had suffered from
an internal trouble peculiar to her sex, which riding would
make worse'. ¹ A partisan of hers would say that the
medical charge preferred, on no good evidence, against
the husband was now being changed, by his admirers,
into a parallel charge against his suffering wife. A bio-
grapher of the childless pair will admit the probability of

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