CHAPTER II.

BIRTH OF CARLYLE AND DEATH OF BURNS-BIRTH-PLACE AND PARENTAGE-ANECDOTES OF HIS FATHER AND MOTHER.

THE month of December 1795, which was darkened by national distress consequent on a failure of that year's harvest, and by political agitation of excessive violence resulting from the stringent Sedition Bill passed by the dominant party to restrict the expression of public sentiment, is perhaps even more memorable as having witnessed the one meeting in the struggle of public life that took place between the two greatest Scotsmen of the period. While Robert Burns was upholding with his pen the cause of freedom as represented by the Liberal leader Henry Erskine, Walter Scott was voting in the Parliament House at Edinburgh for the reactionary Dundas. But what we now care most to remember was the sore trouble that had entered the humble home of the poet at Dumfries. For four months the life of his youngest child, "a sweet little girl," as he described her in a letter written on one of those sad December days to Mrs Dunlop, had been trembling in the balance; his own health was giving way; poverty held him in its grip so tightly that he was obliged to write to a friend for the loan of a guinea; and in the anxious, sleepless hours of the night he was incessantly asking himself, "What will become of my

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.