ABSTRACT
Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan on the 4th of December 1795. Of his father, James Carlyle, he has left an impressive memorial. The old man died in January 1832 at the age of seventy-five, and his son could not leave London to go to his burial. James Carlyle was a Scottish peasant of a type well known north of the border, bred in a school of hardship, a man “religious with the consent of his whole faculties.” Margaret Aitken, Carlyle’s mother, was a woman of character and kindliness, of that Scottish kind who bear men, and have body and mind and soul enough to breed them. Carlyle was taken to see Coleridge, and he has left a vivid account of their meeting. Carlyle’s men and women live, and that in no conventional sense of the word.
