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. 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