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idolatry; all the other politicians in Europe were the merest "windbags," he the only genuine article in that line. Against the friend above-mentioned, he maintained that the influence of a great united Germany would be peaceful, though an observation with which he backed up this opinion scarcely seemed to support it. The very name German, he said, indicated that he had always been distinguished for his warlike character and success in arms. He is the guerre-man, that is, the war-man. "It's just the same word we have in Scotland, 'I'll gar ye do't.'"* And so he went on pointing out how guarantee, and probably the word war itself, came from the same root. Yet the German, he would have it, was radically one of the most peaceful of human beings-the very last to pick a quarrel; but when driven to it, he will also be the last to yield.

This might serve as Carlyle's motto. His theory put Erskine of Linlathen in mind of old Sir Harry Moncreiff's saying, that we need men who will "mak' us for to know it," and who will also "mak' us for to do it."

CHAPTER XXII.

HIS ATTACHMENT TO SCOTLAND-ASSISTS THE FUND FOR THE NIECES OF BURNS-SOME CLERICAL FRIENDS— HIS SCOTTISH VERSICLES-GEORGE GILFILLAN-VISITS ΤΟ SCOTLAND AT RUTHERFORD'S GRAVE-AN INVETERATE SMOKER-" TAK' A GUDE LOOK AT HIM!" -AT HIS NIECE'S WEDDING.

CARLYLE was a thorough Scot. He clung, with a fond and almost passionate tenacity, to more than the dialect and accent of his "own stern Motherland." Never was there a man who preserved everywhere, and to the last, the mint-mark of the place of his nativity as he did. Not even honest Allan Cunningham may be named as approaching him in this respect. It was not only the quaint but musical speech of Annandale that he carried about with him during the whole of his earthly pilgrimage; in mind and heart-in all the essential qualities of his being -he bore the stamp of that south-western region of Scotland that will be known to coming generations as preeminently the Land of Carlyle. London he selected as his place of residence simply for its convenience as a literary workshop. In the forty-seven years that followed his settlement in Cheyne Row hardly a summer passed in which he did not revisit his native district. Even after his mother was gone, he never failed to look in

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upon his brothers and sisters at their respective homes, taking an interest in their domestic welfare and preserving fresh and vigorous the recollections of his childhood. One nephew he took away to push his fortune in the metropolis, in the house of his own publishers; and when his wife was suddenly snatched from his side it was a sister's child that he asked to come and keep house for him in the distant wilderness where he dwelt. One other sister, married to a farmer in a bleak upland part of their native district, he tried to make more comfortable by endeavours, often renewed, to get a belt of trees to grow round her mountain home; but all the efforts of "oor Tam" proved futile-the young trees he brought, or sent, never came to anything, the place was so exposed and the soil so uncongenial. To Dumfriesshire he would have latterly returned altogether, he told his friend Thomas Aird, but for the fear that he might become intellectually torpid away from the society to which he had become accustomed, and which can only be procured in the great city. Those who enjoyed the privi

lege of visiting Carlyle, especially if they were fellowcountrymen, can testify how vivid were his reminiscences of his early days at Ecclefechan and Annan, and how he liked nothing better than to hear of the old companions of his boyhood. That the talk was good, though occasionally a little bitter and stinging in its characterisations, when he got on the subject of the worthies he had known in his youth, need not be told to those who have read his graphic picture of the "steel-grey" peasant-prophet, Dr Lawson of Selkirk. When a West Country humourist like the late John Kelso Hunter published his autobiography, no

reader enjoyed it more than Carlyle, and he praised that book of genuine homespun, in no stinted measure, for its "good humour and canny shrewdness," and especially "for the pleasant way in which it had reminded him of what he himself knew so well long ago." He liked its "subdued vein of just satire," too, which ran through it, he said, "like a suspicion of good cognac in a wholesome tumbler of new milk." He was greatly pleased when we told him that his letter to Hunter had been the chief means of sending a large edition of the quaint cobbler-artist's Retrospect over the world, and that Hunter had pocketed the largest sum ever got by the author of any volume published in the West of Scotland. "He deserves it," said Carlyle; "there was truth, and humour too, in that book of the Cobbler's-I mind it well." In 1859, when the Scottish people were celebrating the Centenary of Burns's birth, he gave hearty support, both by pen and purse, to the fund for the Misses Begg, the nieces of the poet. "Could all the eloquence," he wrote, "that will be uttered over the world on the 25th next, or even all the tavern bills that will be incurred, but convert themselves into solid cash for those two interesting persons, what a sum were there of benefit received, and of loss avoided, to all the parties concerned! I think, at least, the question ought to be everywhere put, pointedly, yet with due politeness, wherever in Scotland, or elsewhere, there is an assemblage of men met to express their admiration, tragic pity, &c., for Burns, what amount of money they will give to save from indigence these two nieces of Burns? The answer, virtual answer, which this question got in 1842, threw rather a dismal light to me on such assem

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blages; but they ought to be tried again, with more direct emphasis; and very shame will perhaps force them to do something towards saving indigent merit on the one hand, and saving on the other what is too truly a frightful (though eloquent) expenditure of pavement to a certain locality we have all heard of!" This letter contributed in no slight degree to secure the success with which the effort was crowned. With the London Scots, however, of the toddy drinking and rhetorical species, who prove their patriotism chiefly at taverns, he would have nothing to do. They tried, more than once, to catch him for the presidential chair, but they never succeeded. In 1870, one of their number published a letter, wherein he gave an account, not meant to be amusing, of how he and three other compatriots got up the London dinner in celebration of the Burns Centenary, at which James Hannay presided. Two of the originators of the scheme (thought to be so great a scheme that years afterwards there was actually a printed controversy as to who started it) were deputed to wait, most likely appointed themselves to wait, upon Carlyle at his Chelsea home, to see if he would take the chair! "We might as well have stayed at home, however," was their lugubrious report. His attachment to the land of his birth was too deep and tender to admit of such a degradation-for, to a man of his nature, it would have been nothing short of that-a speech about Scotland and Burns, at a convival gathering in a tavern, by Thomas Carlyle, being a phenomenon simply inconceivable.

Though he did not patronise their "kirks" to any appreciable extent, having, indeed, usually a small congregation of his own to minister to at his own house on the Sundays,