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Updated: June 17, 2025
"I swithered lang about leaving her, but a good opportunity came, and Bessie promised me to go back to her father until I could come after her. It was July then, and when Christmas came round I had saved money enough, and I started wi' a blithe heart to Ecclefechan.
First, the implied assertion, "Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move," that Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism extant: for what is his French Revolution but a cannonade in three volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval?
There can be no doubt that his intercourse with this class, as with men of affairs and letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border moors. Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.
But such had not been his wish, so he was buried beside his father and mother in the old churchyard at Ecclefechan. Stories from Carlyle, by D. M. Ford. Readings from Carlyle, by W. Keith Leask. A LITTLE time after Carlyle's French Revolution was published he wrote to his brother, "I understand there have been many reviews of a very mixed character. I got one in the Times last week.
Froude, Tyndall, and Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan, where he lies with his father and mother. Dean Stanley had offered Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused. Carlyle was buried among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best understood.
The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught while he was considering what vocation to follow.
From Mainhill the highway descends slowly to the village of Ecclefechan, the site of which is marked to the eye, a mile or more away, by the spire of the church rising up against a background of Scotch firs, which clothe a hill beyond. I soon enter the main street of the village, which in Carlyle's youth had an open burn or creek flowing through the center of it.
Soon after Carlyle died I went to Ecclefechan and stood by his grave. It was not a day that I would have chosen for such an errand, for it was cold, grey, and hard, and towards the afternoon it rained a slow, persistent, wintry rain. The kirkyard in Ecclefechan was dismal and depressing, but my thoughts were not there.
Carlyle is possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at Ecclefechan.
If, indeed, such was his ordinary speech, and not, as some have suggested, a manner adopted on particular occasions for the purpose of identifying himself with the mass of his hearers, the fact is evidence merely that he retained through his mature life, on the one hand, some relics of an old-fashioned good usage, and, on the other, some traces of the brogue of the district in which he was born, just as Edmund Pendleton used to say "scaicely" for scarcely, and as John Taylor, of Caroline, would say "bare" for bar; just as Thomas Chalmers always retained the brogue of Fifeshire, and Thomas Carlyle that of Ecclefechan.
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