poor wife and bairns when I am taken away?" Ere seven months had come and gone after that bleak December, the "awkward squad"-aptly symbolising a nation that knew not the value of the gift till it was gone -had fired their farewell shots over the grave of Burns. It was while the great light of the Scottish nation was flickering to extinction at Dumfries that its successor dawned in a still humbler domicile in an obscure hamlet not more than sixteen miles distant from the burgh in which Burns breathed his last. Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan,* in the parish of Hoddam, on Tuesday the 4th December 1795.†

He was the first child of James Carlyle and Margaret Aitken, who had been married on the 5th March in the same year. Like Hugh Miller, his father was originally a stonemason, and at the time of his son's birth he had reached the mature age of thirty-seven-the very same age as that of the poet who was then dying at Dumfries. There is a slight discrepancy in the statements that were published during Mr Carlyle's lifetime, both as to the precise position occupied by James Carlyle when he became a father, and also as to his residence at that date. According to the account that might fairly enough

* It has been stated in some of the newspaper obituaries of Carlyle that this village was also the birth-place of Dr Currie; but the biographer of Burns, born in 1756, first saw the light at KirkpatrickFleming, in the same county of Dumfries, of which parish his father was then the minister.

+ The coincidence is worth noting that the still surviving Leopold von Ranke, who has performed for English history a service akin to that which Carlyle rendered to German history, was born in Thuringia in the same month of the same year as his Scottish contemporary-Dec. 21, 1795.