Strong, rough, and
eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words
like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the
Brontes on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of
Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as
her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her
favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her
heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a
fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late
in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they
talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she
was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the
unfailing sunshine of her anxious love.
Book II. of _Sartor_ is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly
a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to
his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of
Teufelsdroeckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the
place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks
are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as
a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth
and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also
the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house,
where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather
to bear than to do.
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