of her mind, both as to its strength and independence, is sufficiently attested by the fact-the most remarkable we know concerning her-that it was she who first suggested to her son that new theory as to the character of Cromwell which he was the first to lay before the world. It was through her spiritual instincts, we are told, that she had discovered that the then prevailing estimate of the Protector was incorrect; and more than this we do not require to know, in order to feel that her son was indeed justified in indulging that tone of personal selfgratulation which may be detected in one of his aphorisms, to the effect that no able man ever had a fool for a mother. To strength of brain she united a most winsome tenderness of heart; and there can be no doubt that Carlyle's delicacy of insight, and poetic sensibility, were inherited from his mother. While he was fond of dwelling on her virtues, he would confess that she was "entirely too peaceable and pious for this planet ;" and he was wont humorously to deplore some sad results of her enjoining non-resistance upon him at school. love for her amounted to a kind of worship, and tradition has handed down many touching little anecdotes-that about her learning to write being one of the numberwhich go to prove that the affection of the son was recriprocated to the full.

His

When we know that it was she who suggested that vindication of Cromwell, which many regard as his greatest, and which is certainly his most satisfactory work, we are not surprised to be told that, though most of the subjects upon which her son wrote were new to her, she read all his books with great care, and particularly read and re-read his French Revolution. One of his college

Anecdote of his Mother.

21

friends, like himself an Ecclefechan man, used often to call on Mrs Carlyle and get an early reading of her son's latest book, which, with filial attention, was always forwarded to her at the earliest possible moment. This gentleman would read the book aloud to the old lady, doing his best, no doubt, to help her over the difficulties; for it was her frequent, if not invariable, salutation, “I hae gotten anither o' Tam's buiks, but I can mak' naething o't." We suspect, however, that she generally contrived to master them. It is said that she was at first somewhat disturbed by the new religious views she met with in the books, but when she found that her son was The in earnest, and steadfast, she cared for no more. first anecdote that we remember to have heard concerning Carlyle, was one relating to the visit he paid to his mother, for the purpose of spending a few days with her before he set off for Germany to procure materials for his Life of Frederick. On the morning when he had to take his departure, a little group of friends—all of whom, we fear, must now be gone-were gathered on the railway platform at Ecclefechan to see him off. On entering the booking office he happened to put his hand into his coat pocket, where he discovered something bulky, of whose presence he did not seem to have been aware. He at once took it out, and on unfolding the mysterious parcel, he discovered it to contain some nice home-made Dumfriesshire bannocks, which his mother-just as when he was a little boy at school-had stowed away in his pocket, that he might use them on his journey. The discovery was too much for him. The simple circumstance had transported him to the days of childhood; and when his friends came forward to grasp his hand, his eyes were

suffused with tears, and his voice trembled.

One of the two saddest visits he ever paid to Scotsbrig was in the last hours of 1853, when his venerable mother was laid in the grave. She died on Christmas Day. She had survived her husband twenty-one years.

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."