pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and "reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also, in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to exasperate the libels, in some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature." And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him two alternatives-to go with the family to France or to remain in the country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge,' “that I have done with them. . . . I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for £200 a year." There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a friend called Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others, as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to Platonic autocracy, continued to take 1 Vide Carlyle's Life of Sterling, chap. viii., p. 79. a deep interest; on other days they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De Quincey's review of Meister, and in recounting the event credits himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some points; if so let him be admonitory." But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell," however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr. Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he saw Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and Talma act, and what was of more moment, had his first sight of the Continent and the city of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder. Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street; he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of Meister, and wrote more epistolary satires, welcome at Haddington. In March, 1825, Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life, there is a truce to complaining. Here, free from the noises, which are the pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold. Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years: With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly important of my life. . . . I found that I had conquered all my scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory. . . . Once more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself seemed improving. . . Nowhere can I recollect of myself such pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen hundred years. Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his tyrannous love of liberty: It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of consciousness of inward dignity-I have gained since I came within the walls of this poor cottage-my own four walls. They simply admit that I am Herr im Hause, and act on this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that I am an unintelligible mortal, fâcheux to deal with, but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls. The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the Ꭰ writer, the actual composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his career, beginning: The storm and night is on the waste, Wild through the wind the huntsman calls, As fast on willing nag I haste Home to my own four walls. The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance: King George has palaces of pride, And armed grooms must ward those halls; Within my own four walls. Not all his men may sever this; It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls; My whinstone house my castle is- When fools or knaves do make a rout, CHAPTER III. CRAIGENPUTTOCK. [1826-1834.] "Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin', light-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister Then there was Maister Carlyle himsel', and he cam' to finish her off like."-HADDINGTON NURSE. My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a furlong's distance."-T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct., 1830. DURING the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis of his career, i.e. his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of which he was greatly himself to blame. No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life, already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion. Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane Baillie Welsh (b. 1801, d. 1866)-descended on the paternal side from Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to an inheritance of gipsy blood-belonged to a |