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Updated: June 17, 2025
He stood gazing into the fire till recalled to himself by the boiling of the billy; then a triumphant smile invaded his stern features; he took the billy off the crook, threw the tea into it, clapped both hands on my shoulders, and quoted with fine effect that lucid passage from Burns: Bye attour, ma gutcher has A heigh hoose an' a leigh A' firbye ma bony sel', The lad o' Ecclefechan! "Ha-ha-ha!
Does it become such a one to rave against the West India negro's incapacity for self-civilization? Unaided by the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been, at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods of Ecclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like his Piet ancestors.
The churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the family, all with coats of arms two griffins with adders' stings. More definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that dullest of county villages as a carpenter.
An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague, in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was soon to be taught at Concord. As one meditates upon the idealism of the first colonists in America, one is tempted to ask what their "reverences" were.
James Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year L100, till, after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill, a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about L1000.
Borrow himself crossed over to Stranraer and had a month's walking in Scotland, to Glen Luce, Castle Douglas, Dumfries, Ecclefechan, Carlisle, Gilnochie, Hawick, Jedburgh, Yetholm, Kelso, Melrose, Coldstream, Berwick, and Edinburgh. He talked to the people, admired the scenery, bathed, and enjoyed his meals.
He lived on during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin.
The following is on neither subject, and consequently is no song; but will be allowed, I think, to be two or three pretty good prose thoughts, inverted into rhyme. Ecclefechan, 7th Feb. 1795. My Dear Thomson, You cannot have any idea of the predicament in which I write to you.
Deservedly popular and full of patriotic fire, the class of literature to which they belong renders questions of fairness or unfairness beside the point. Another contributor to the Edinburgh Review, also famous as a historian, was Thomas Carlyle. He was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, and wrote for Brewster's Encyclopædia and the London Magazine as well as the Edinburgh.
But another and a much more important factor in the problem is to be found in the old Seceder ideal of the ministry in which he was trained and which he never lost. It has been truly said of him that "he never all his life got away from David Inglis and Stockbridge any more than Carlyle got away from John Johnston and Ecclefechan."
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