be deemed the best accredited, since it came from the pen of a personal friend of Carlyle's, and was printed in a volume which he had himself authorised, he was born "in the parish of Middlebie, about half a mile from the village of Ecclefechan," and it is added that "his father was a small farmer in comfortable circumstances."* But there is every reason to believe that the father, presently to become a small farmer and by and by a pretty extensive one, was at the date of his marriage still following his original occupation as a stonemason, being also a bit of an architect, and that at the time of Thomas's birth his parents were resident in the village. James Carlyle had come into possession of two small one-storeyed cottages in Ecclefechan, between which a lane ran conducting to some houses at the back, and over this lane he thriftily threw an arch, thus connecting the cottages, besides adding a storey to their height. He let the ground floor to a baker, and, with his young wife, occupied one-half of the top floor, containing two rooms. It was in the smaller of these, the room immediately over the arch, a mere cupboard, nine feet by five, that Thomas Carlyle (according to this story) was born. To this day nothing is changed in the inner or outer aspect of the house, which is now inhabited by the gravedigger of the village and his family.† The father was the second of five brothers, sons of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brownknowe, a small farm Biographical Memoir by Thomas Ballantyne, prefixed to Passages selected from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman & Hall. 1855. P. 1. + The Biographical Magazine. No. 1, June 1877. London: Trübner & Co. in Annandale, all of whom, it is said, followed the same occupation of stonemason; and who have left behind them, in the locality, a reputation for great strength, as well as eccentricity of character. "The Carlyles were like no other people," we have been told by more than one person who knew them. Strongly marked were their features, both of mind and body; and to intellectual powers and moral force, much above the average, they would seem to have united a pugilistic tendency, and even a "fractiousness," to borrow a native term, that sometimes developed itself in peculiar forms. "Pithy, bitter-speaking bodies, and awfu' fechters," is the description of them given by one neighbour; and the sentence gathers up in a few words the most of the opinion that has been handed down by their contemporaries to the present generation, and which is found floating to-day all over Annandale. Of the five brothers, James appears to have been the most notable, both in respect to his skill as a mason, and his general sagacity, as well as in some other respects. The local traditions regarding him, indicate a character in many ways akin to that of his illustrious son. "What a root of a bodie he was!" exclaimed one old lady of Ecclefechan who had known him well; "Ay, a curious bcdie: he beat this warld. A spirited bodie; he would sit on no man's coat tails. And sic stories he could tell! Sic sayings, too! Sic names he would give to things and folk! Sic words he had as were never heard before!" He was a great reader as well as a great talker. "It was a muckle treat to be in his house at nicht, to hear him tell stories and tales. But he was always a very strict old bodie, and could bide no contradiction." Mr Ballantyne describes him as "a man possessing great force of character, of an earnest, religious nature, and much respected throughout the district, not less for his moral worth than for his native strength of intellect." He seems to have had many of the good qualities, the intelligence, earnestness, and moral purity, that shone conspicuous in the father of Burns; and we have sometimes thought, that when delineating the peasant-saint in the third Book of Sartor Resartus,* Carlyle had the figure of his own father vividly before his mind. But the elder Burns, we should say, though he could be stern on occasion and was of a sombre temperament, had a gentleness and a quiet dignity that did not pertain to the more active-minded, self-assertive, and even rather contentious Borderer. Annandale, we must bear in mind, had been for many centuries the arena of incessant warfare; and the fighting quality, brought to a high pitch of perfection in all the old families of the "Debateable Land,"† descended with much of its medieval vigour to the eighteenth century Carlyles. Truth to tell, there seems to have been in Carlyle's father at least a touch of what his son found, and describes so well, in a second Ayrshire worthy, "Old * “Sublimer in this world know I nothing than a Peasant Saint. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splendour of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of the Earth, like a light shining in great darkness."-Sartor Resartus, Book iii. Chap. 4. + The Debateable Land is the title of a Dumfriesshire local history, or historical pamphlet rather; said to be a valuable little work in its way, manifesting considerable research. It was written by a Thomas Carlyle, described as " of Waterbeck." No student of the history of England and Scotland needs to be told the origin of the name which gave a title to his pamphlet. Sulphur Brand," the irascible father of Boswell, known in the Parliament House at Edinburgh as Lord Auchinleck, and who, being a staunch Whig, proved more than a match even for Dr Johnson, when the two got on politics at his lordship's seat in Ayrshire. Of Carlyle's father, many anecdotes are still current at Ecclefechan. Some of these, as we might expect, are apocryphal, especially a set of stories that represent him and his brothers as noted pugilists; it is just possible, however, there may be a grain of truth in the anecdote that, while working as a mason, he, in order to evince his contempt for a "pup" (that is, a dandy) who was passing, let fall upon him, from the top of the ladder, a huge mass of mortar. A venerable native of Ecclefechan (alive and resident in Glasgow the other day), who is old enough to remember him, tells of the unfailing regularity, and almost soldier-like strictness of discipline with which the rustic patriarch marshalled his family into the front pew of the gallery in the Burgher Kirk, where they worshipped; and one little incident she relates is not without significance. The windows of the meeting-house being destitute of blinds, many of the congregation were inconvenienced on the warm summer days by the burning rays of the sun. A proposal was made to procure blinds, and a subscription started. The collectors called' on old Carlyle, and stated their case, expressing a hope that he would give something. "What!" he exclaimed, "you want siller to shut God's blessed licht out o' His ain house? Na, na, I'll give you nothing for sic a purpose. If you had wanted more licht it would have been a different matter, and I micht have given you a subscription." So the llectors had to go away as they Anecdote of his Father. 17 came. Another story, though homely and even grotesque, illustrates his hatred of all deceit. One of his children-there were nine in all-was about to be married, and the young folks concluded, in view of the festive occasion, that it would be seemly to have the doors and walls of the house adorned with a coating of paint. But the father refused to listen to this proposal, holding that it was better to let the old walls remain in their native integrity than to pollute them with what he regarded as the brush of falsehood. The rest of the household, however, remained resolute in their determination, and gave the painters instructions to proceed with the work, meanwhile bringing all their batteries of persuasion to bear on their father, in which effort they were probably assisted by the gentle mother. The combined pleadings, however, were all urged in vain. On the appointed day came the painters, whereupon the old man, who had planted himself in the doorway of his domicile, demanded to know what had brought them thither. To pent the hoose," they replied. "To pent the hoose!" he exclaimed; "ye can just slent the bog (that is, retrace your steps) wi' yer ash-backet feet, for ye'll pit nane o' yer glaur (mud) on my door." As he advanced in life, he became more decidedly religious, and one proof of this was furnished by the gradual mellowing of his d told a friend that his reading theology, and i author. "He could no books," said his son, "a, presence of Heaven, and Carlyle thought his father, n. Mr Carlyle once special fondness for en was his favourite nything fictitious in kad a man in the full nd de Judgment." Mr nsidered, the best B |