the University of Otago, in 1871. While at Monkton he betrayed a dislike to any mention of his illustrious uncle being made in his presence. The good man came to know better as the years went by; and at the antipodes he enjoyed the lustre that was reflected upon him from the chief of Scottish song. It was probably during the Annan days that Carlyle went to Dumfries to see the grave of Burns. This glimpse of his boyhood, a picture that must henceforth be treasured in the Scottish heart, he gave to an American visitor a few years ago during a walk from Chelsea to Piccadilly. He told of his early admiration of Burns-how he used to creep into the churchyard of Dumfries, when a little boy, and find the tomb of the poet, and sit and read the simple inscription by the hour. "There it was," said he, "in the midst of poor fellowlabourers and artisans, and the name-Robert Burns!" At morn, at noon, and eventide, he loved to go and read that name. Thus were thoughts dimly suggested to the mind of the boy, that quickened and grew, till at length, in his manhood, they found expression in what was the first-and seems likely to be the last-worthy and allsufficing exposition of the life and works of the Scottish bard.

CHAPTER V.

THE SECESSION KIRK- -CARLYLE'S PORTRAIT OF DR LAWSON LETTER TO A PASTOR'S WIDOW ANOTHER LINK WITH BURNS.

CARLYLE'S parents were Nonconformists; and it was in the Secession Church at Ecclefechan, of which his father and mother were members, that he received such nutriment as the Scottish pulpit was destined to bestow upon him in his early years. Those who know what that particular branch of the Church was at the dawn of our century, and especially the character of its leading lights, will have no difficulty, as they read his works, in discerning the permanent mark which this part of his youthful culture left upon his mind and heart. It was a Church which had its origin in the attachment of the best part of the Scottish nation to two things without which a true Church is simply impossible-purity of doctrine and life, and freedom of administration. Its chief founders were Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, the former of whom, along with three other parish ministers, had been expelled from their ministerial charges by the General Assembly in 1733 for their faithful protest against the worldly policy which had degraded the doctrine and the life of the Established Church, besides annihilating the rights of the people by the infliction of the tyrannical Law of Patronage. In 1747 the new communion, which, however, represented

the old spirit of the Scottish people, was unhappily broken into two sections by a difference of opinion with respect to the burgess oath, which imposed on all who swore it a pledge "to profess and allow the true religion presently professed within this realm, and authorised by the laws thereof." Some held that the swearing of this oath was virtual approval of the Establishment with all its corruptions; others maintained that the oath referred only to the true religion as professed, but did not involve any approval of the mode of its settlement by the State. The controversy led to a separation. The party which objected to the taking of the oath formed itself into the General Associate Synod; the other section retained the original title of Associate Synod. The former body were popularly styled the Anti-Burghers, the latter the Burghers-names that remained in use long after they had ceased to represent any living reality.

The church at Ecclefechan belonged to the Burgher branch of the Secession. Its pastor, the Rev. John Johnston, was a notable man, an excellent scholar, and in every other essential respect the model of what a Christian minister ought to be. He had studied theology under Professor Brown of Haddington; and he was himself the first classical tutor of a carpenter's son in Peeblesshire, who made his mark on the spiritual history of Scotland as Professor Lawson of Selkirk. The lines in Sartor that may be construed as bearing at least some reference to the church which Carlyle attended with his parents are few, but they are impressive. "The highest whom I knew on earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven: such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of

The Burgher Minister.

43

your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelopment of Fear."

The United Presbyterian Church,* in which all sections of the Seceders are now happily included, is represented at Ecclefechan to-day by a handsome Gothic edifice, situated close by the churchyard, with a square clock tower-the most conspicuous object in the village; but it was in a rude little meeting-house, in no wise differing from the cottages of the peasantry, and which the pilgrim may still see standing by the roadside as he walks from the railway station to the village, that the young soul was impressed with the awe to which he has given such memorable utterance.

More fully, both in conversation and in letters, did Carlyle, down to his closing years on the earth, testify to the depth and duration of that hallowed influence. Oftener than once he was heard to declare, "I have seen many capped and equipped bishops, and other episcopal dignitaries; but I have never seen one who more beautifully combined in himself the Christian and the Christian gentleman than did Mr Johnston." To the blind preacher Milburn, from America, he said (in 1860) that "it was very pleasant to see his father in his daily and weekly relations with the minister. They had been friends from youth. That minister (he must have said the

"We had the pleasure of visiting the locality in the month of August last, and found several relatives of Mr Carlyle, all in comfortable circumstances, and mostly connected with the United Presbyterian Church."-Thomas Carlyle: the Man and Teacher. By David Hodge, M. A. Ardrossan : Arthur Guthrie. 1873.

minister's son) was the first person that ever taught me Latin, and I am not sure but that he laid a very great curse upon me in so doing. I think it is likely I should have been a wiser man, and certainly a godlier one, if I had followed in my father's steps, and left Greek and Latin to the fools that wanted them."*

When the summer communions came round there often stood by the village pastor's side, in the pulpit at Ecclefechan, his old pupil, now the learned and pious Professor from the little Secession Academy at Selkirk; and that these occasions were not forgotten by at least one youthful hearer has been put beyond dispute by the testimony of Carlyle himself. When the late Dr John Macfarlane, of Glasgow, latterly of Clapham, published his memoir of Lawson, he sent a copy of the book to the aged philosopher at Chelsea, and received (in 1870) an acknowledgment which was probably the most fondlycherished guerdon for what had been his labour of love. "Your Biography of Dr Lawson," wrote Carlyle, "has interested me not a little, bringing present to me from afar much that it is good to be reminded of; strangely awakening many thoughts, many scenes and recollections of forty, of sixty years ago-all now grown very sad to me, but also very beautiful and solemn. It seems to me I gather from your narrative and from his own letters a

Thomas Carlyle: His Life, his Books, his Theories. By Alfred H. Guernsey. New York, 1879. Milburn, who dictated the recollections of his conversations with Carlyle to Mr Guernsey, makes Carlyle say that his father was "an elder of the Kirk," and that his pastor was "minister of the parish." The reporter must have forgotten the exact words that were really used by Carlyle. The report throughout is evidently a very free one, though bearing the marks of general authenticity.