He was always under the control of severe love of truth.
He lived and died a poor man.' She was terribly disappointed in him, but
she loved him. Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot:

In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to
me--_forty-five years of love-letters_, the last as tender and
passionate as the first. And how full of noble sentiments! The
midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and
disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene--as bright as
the morning, and _more_ serene. Now it is night with me, and must
remain so till the dawn of another day. I am always alone--that is,
_I live with him_.

The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M.
Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but
there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or
thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very
interesting. Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail
of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.

Literature, one's sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in
abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable
jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyaenas whetting the tooth to
eat them up? Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither shall
we ever mend it; at best let us hope to mend ourselves. I declare I
sometimes think of throwing down the Pen altogether as a worthless
weapon; and leading out a colony of these poor starving Drudges to the
waste places of their old Mother Earth, when for sweat of their brow
bread _will_ rise for them; it were perhaps the worthiest service that
at this moment could be rendered our old world to throw open for it
the doors of the New. Thither must they come at last, 'bursts of
eloquence' will do nothing; men are starving and will try many things
before they die. But poor I, ach Gott! I am no Hengist or Alaric;
only a writer of Articles in bad prose; stick to thy last, O Tutor;
the Pen is not worthless, it is omnipotent to those who have Faith.

Henri Beyle (Stendhal), the great, I am often tempted to think the
greatest of French novelists, writes her a charming letter about nuances.
'It seems to me,' he says, 'that except when they read Shakespeare,
Byron, or Sterne, no Englishman understands "nuances"; we adore them. A
fool says to a woman, "I love you"; the words mean nothing, he might as
well say "Olli Batachor"; it is the nuance which gives force to the
meaning.' In 1839 Mrs. Austin writes to Victor Cousin: 'I have seen
young Gladstone, a distinguished Tory who wants to re-establish education
based on the Church in quite a Catholic form'; and we find her
corresponding with Mr. Gladstone on the subject of education. 'If you
are strong enough to provide motives and checks,' she says to him, 'you
may do two blessed acts--reform your clergy and teach your people. As it
is, how few of them conceive what it is to teach a people'! Mr.