... Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was
nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not
freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free
means to unbosom himself.... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear
repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was
ever more or less awed and chilled by him.
James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of
both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their
integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of
winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a
broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a
better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist.
"Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no
more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under
the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable
and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. 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.
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