CHAPTER III.

ETCHINGS OF ECCLEFECHAN VILLAGE CULTURE AND GREAT MEN-THE HOME TRAINING OF CARLYLE-HIS MOTHER'S LESSON-HOW HIS FATHER DIED-ANECDOTES OF HIS CHILDHOOD.

Few writers of even a professed autobiography have given a fuller, and none a more vivid, history of their early life than Carlyle supplies in the second book of Sartor Resartus. The more narrowly we investigate the subject on the spot, the plainer does it appear that those wonderful opening selections from the paper bags of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh are not only a spiritual record of the childhood of Thomas Carlyle, but that they are also a scrupulously faithful picture of the actual scenes and society in the midst of which he was reared. Under the thinnest possible veil, woven by richly humorous fancy, we find portraits of his parents in Father Andreas and Gretchen; and Entepfuhl is a picture of Ecclefechan as accurate as if it had been written for a guide book or a gazetteer. Mrs Oliphant, as the biographer of Edward Irving, visited the place not so many years ago; and she gives a graphic view of the scene where "the low grey hills close in around the little hamlet of Ecclefechan, forgotten shrine of some immemorial Celtic saint; a scene not grandly picturesque, but full of sweet pastoral freedom and solitude; the hills rising grey against the sky, with slopes of springy turf, where the sheep pastured,

and shepherds of an antique type pondered the ways of God to man." But more lovingly minute are the etchings of the village and the surrounding country that have been executed by the superb artist who spent there the happy years which were as ages, when the young spirit, "awakened out of Eternity," had not yet learned what is meant by Time-when as yet Time was no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean."

Each sentence in the opening chapters of the second book of Sartor is the fruit of the impressions made “in those plastic first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seed-grain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree." We are told how the village stood, as it still stands, "in trustful derangement, among the woody slopes ;" and "the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by, among beech-rows, through river after river, into the Donau," is the burn that runs down the centre of the single street that forms Ecclefechan. When we saw it upwards of twenty years ago, on a midsummer day, it seemed rather a sluggish little stream; and it was crossed in the village by a multitude of bridges. It was open at that time; but since then the greater part of it has been covered over,* doubtless to the sanitary advan

* This was effected, at his own sole cost, by Dr Arnott, a son of a native of the village, over whose grave, in the south-east corner of the parish churchyard, there is a headstone with the following epitaph:-"Sacred to the memory of Archibald Arnott, Esq., Kirkconnell Hall; born 1772, died 6th July 1855. Dr Arnott was for many years surgeon of the 20th Foot, and served in Egypt, Maida, Walcheren, throughout the Peninsular War, and in India. At St Helena he was the medical attendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose esteem he won, and whose last moments he soothed. The remainder of his most useful and exemplary life he spent in the retirement of his native place, honoured and beloved by all who knew him."

Changes at Ecclefechan.

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tage and the convenience of the inhabitants; though the good work has involved a sacrifice of the picturesque charm which the burn had for Carlyle in his early days. The pilgrim to his shrine will be pleased to note that, in front of the tenement in which he was born, the streamlet still flows in an open channel; and traces may be seen on its margin of the ash and beech trees with which it was formerly fringed.

Though so many of the lines in Carlyle's picture of the place are as true to-day as they were eighty years ago, some others, like that of the gushing Kuhbach, have been either altered or wholly blotted out. The swineherd's horn, and the spectacle of the "hungry happy quadrupeds starting in hot haste" to answer its welcome morning call, to say nothing of their humorous but orderly return in the evening, when each, "topographically correct," trotted off "through its own lane to its own dwelling," are no longer to be heard or seen. The last swineherd of Ecclefechan long since doffed for ever his "darned gabardine and leather breeches, more resembling slate or discolouredtin breeches," and now sleeps peacefully in the same kirkyard with the bright-eyed boy who was to send the memory of him down through the ages. The Postwagen that used to wend through the village northwards from London to Glasgow "in the dead of night, slow-rolling under its mountains of men and luggage," and which passed "southwards visibly at eventide," has given place to the railway train. And the woodman's axe has been laid years ago to the root of the grand old tree, so long the pride of the villagers, which stretched "like a parasol of twenty ells in radius, overtopping all other rows and clumps;" but there are many people yet alive who

remember the time when, under its shadow, "in the glorious summer twilights," the elders of the hamlet sat talking, just as they had done when little Thomas was one of their most attentive auditors, "often greedily listening," as he himself tells us, to their stories and debates, while "the wearied labourers reclined, and the unwearied children sported, and the young men and maidens often danced to flute-music." The annual cattle fair, however, "undoubtedly the grand summary of Entepfuhl's child-culture," though now shorn of much of its pristine glory, as is the case with all similar institutions in this age of railways, still gathers into a field close by "the elements of an unspeakable hurly-burly;" and looking out and up from any point of 'vantage in the hollow where the village lies we see how faithful remains the word-picture of the "upland irregular wold, where valleys, in comflex branchings, are suddenly or slowly. arranging their descent towards every quarter of the sky."

Such were the scenic and social environments of Carlyle in his childhood. We may add that the village was then, what it has latterly ceased to be, a seat of the gingham manufacture; so that eighty years ago the population was composite, including a large proportion of men and women who wrought at the loom. Indeed, there is an old tombstone in the churchyard, in memory of a Robert Peal, who lived in Ecclefechan, and who died in 1749 at the age of 57, concerning whom the local tradition asserts that he was either the great-grandfather or the greatgrand-uncle of Sir Robert Peel; and it is further stated, by the same authority, that the ancestors of the great statesman, once weavers in Ecclefechan, removed to Lan

Ecclefechan and England.

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cashire to engage in the cotton trade.* Now the population, which numbers about 900, is exclusively agricultural. The older one-storeyed cottages were for the most part built by Carlyle's father and uncle; and as they are regularly whitewashed once a year, on the approach of the annual fair, they have a much tidier appearance than one is accustomed to find in villages farther north. The winsome aspect of the hamlet is enhanced by the more modern tenements being faced with the red sandstone that abounds in the district. This outward neatness is not the only token which tells the stranger passing through from the north that he is leaving Scotland behind him. The country has become more level, the verdure richer; if you ask your way at any roadside cottage, ten to one but you are answered in the dialect of Cumberland or of Lancashire by an English tongue, which wags cheerily to the music of pattens on the clean stone floor; the very tavern signboards proclaim that England is near by intimating "ale and spirits"-an inversion of the Scotch. order or by leaving out altogether what in Scotland is the leading article.

A man's parentage and early surroundings, according to Carlyle's view, are the grand factors in determining the nature of his life; and we have his own authority for concluding that his early position was, in both respects, "favourable beyond the most." Certain sapient editors, with the spirit of provincial self-complacency that is

"There is a short cross street in the village which used to be known as Peal's Wynd, where lived an old lady, Betty Peal, who is said to have been the recipient of Sir Robert Peel's bounty, on the ground that she was considered by him to be a relative."— Scotsman Newspaper, Feb. 11, 1881.