could be. His opinion had been highly | "Oh, a promise goes for very little, my disrespectful also towards Mrs. Colling- star, in such a case as this. There is wood — perhaps hardly more so than she nothing that we ought not to do for Lancy, deserved; but the least suspicion of any- even to the point of telling him ourselves, thing like the truth, and that he had been if he was in temptation, or seemed likely adopted for his own sake, never entered to fall again, and to know of such a poshis head. sible part in us might help to keep him upright for our sake — only

"Only," she went on, when he paused, "only that, for the chance of elevating him, we should be sacrificing Donald. We should break Donald's heart."

"A boy's heart is not so easily broken," he replied.

"But he is our good boy a very loving son," she answered almost reproachfully, "who has never made us ashamed of him. Shall we take everything away from him, and fill him with doubt and distress in order to give almost nothing to the other?"

So Donald Johnstone wrote to Mrs. Collingwood, and told her that he did not consider a lengthened period of idleness and pleasure at all suitable for Lancy at his early age; that he did not approve of mere feminine supervision for a highspirited youth; and that he trusted to her known affection for him not to damage his prospects by making the restraints of professional life irksome to him. The first step was now to be taken towards fitting him for his profession. When Mrs. Collingwood got this letter she was excessively disappointed; and then on reading it a second time, she was ex- "Not if we can help it, my dear," and ceedingly wrath. She felt the galling at that moment Lancy came into the nature of this yoke under which she had room. "I've got a letter from my mamput her neck. Lancy had made her so ma," he said, he would not call her mother. sure she should get her own way, that she" She says you do not like me to take a was resolved to do battle for it; and she wrote, urging her claim to his company, and begging that he might not be forced against his will to be frequently among people who knew of "the childish faults which he had been so long and so severely punished for." "And besides, sir," she continued, "you are quite wrong if think my dear boy has no natural feelings towards me, his mother. He knows his duty to you, and he strives to do it; but he takes it hard that he is never to be with me, and you may depend that I do." Then she went on: "And I think it is but right, sir, that you should ask Mrs. Johnstone whether she thinks I ought to be always kept out of seeing my dear boy. She knows what a mother's feelings are; and, though she is always so high with me, she will tell you that no mother could put up with what I am putting up with much longer."

long tour with her, dear father and mother, but will I ask if I may go for one month?" The letter was duly read; one month or six weeks was the phrase used, and the letter was both urgent and humble.

66

"You wish to go?"

Yes, father, if you don't mind."

66 you

Of course Mrs. Johnstone saw this letter. She sighed as she folded it up. "Donald, I am afraid if she will have him, she must have him. When we met, you carried things with a high hand, and I hoped she did not see her own power. Now, on reflection, I believe she does."

"Yes," he answered, "she is sure, you are sure, and I am almost sure, Lancy is hers. Let her take him for a while, and I think she will be appeased; but withstand her, and she will tell him all."

"You might exact a promise from her as the price of your consent."

Then observing that the tender woman whom he called mother was moved, and that her eyes, more moist and bright than usual, seemed to dwell on his face attentively, Lancy blushed and said, "I think I ought to pity her, for, as she often says, I am her only child."

Mr. Johnstone looked at him deliberately, and without any tenderness of aspect; he seemed to take a moment's time to consider his words, then he said, "If you were my only child, I should hardly love you more; certainly I could not be one whit more anxious for your welfare. Therefore, knowing her feelings, and considering that her present request is reasonable (her wish to take you away for a year was not), I think if your mother agrees with me —— Here he paused, and it pained them both a little, when, after waiting just one short instant for her rejoinder, he said rather urgently,

"Oh, mother, you always wish me to have treats - mother, you'll let me go?" "Yes," she said, without looking at him.

He scarcely observed her emotion, certainly never divined that it was on his

From The London Times.
MR. CARLYLE.

account, but he gave her the customary | born on the 4th of December, 1795. He kiss they always bestowed when thanking was the eldest son of a family of eight her for any favor, and he took out of the children; his brothers were all men of room with him a vivid recollection of what character and ability; one of them, Dr. Donald Johnstone had said. He felt a John Carlyle, was destined to make a little daunted by it. He knew it would be name in literature as the translator of a restraint upon him. But it was no re- Dante. Mr. Carlyle's father, James Car straint as regarded that only point at lyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenwhich just then he was in danger. ant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son's birth James Carlyle was a stone-mason, and resided in Ecclefechan ; but he became afterwards tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle's youngest and only surviving brother. James Carlyle was a man of rectitude, worth, and intelligence, and in many ways remarkable. His son once said, "I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people," and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. Of the former especially he liked to talk, and he once made the remark that he thought his father, all things considered, the best man whom he had ever known. There were points of strong likeness between them. The father was a man of energy and strong will; and he had in no small measure the picturesque and vivid pow ers of speech of the son, and liked to use out-of-the-way, old-fashioned, sharp, and pungent words. His pithy sayings, occasionally prickly and sharp, ran through the country-side. His favorite books were the Bible and an old Puritan divine. He was, said his son on one occasion to a friend, “a far cleverer man than I am, or ever will be." An elder in the kirk, and a man of established character for probity, he was one who, to use again his son's description of him, "like Enoch of old, walked with God." All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle's father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk-simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth. Carlyle learned to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father's friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the burgh school of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, "his first friend," as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Lads still go very young to Scotch universities; sixty years ago they went still younger, and were wont to quit them

THOMAS CARLYLE died at half past eight on Saturday morning, February 5th, at his house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. He had been for some years in feeble health, and more than once in 1879 and 1880 his recovery seemed doubtful. Of late even his friends saw little of him. He could not bear the strain of prolonged or exciting conversation, and growing weakness, approaching, as he himself said, almost constant pain, had compelled him to give up very much his old habit of taking long walks every day. But since early manhood he had been frequently subject to ailments; dyspepsia and kindred weaknesses had been his scourge since his college days; he had rallied more than once from severe attacks of illness; and it was not supposed until quite recently that his end was near. The announcement of his death will bring home to every educated Englishman its significance. A chasm opens between the present and the past of our literature, a whole world of associations disappears. No recent man of letters has held in England a place comparable to that which for at least a quarter of a century has been his without dispute, and authors of all kinds and schools will feel that they have lost their venerable doyen. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal regret. The close has come of a well-ordered, full, stately, and complete life.

About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most penetrating and sympathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle's birthplace was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Hoddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memora ble for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was

with their degrees, if they cared to take and result, some imperfect resemblance any, which they rarely did, at an age when of our high seminary." Still Carlyle an English youth has not quitted a public profited much by the four years spent at school. Carlyle was barely fourteen when college. He read hard, even to the point he entered the University of Edinburgh. of injuring his health; he acquired a It was then in its glory. Some of its sound and, for his years, unusual knowlprofessors possessed a European reputa- edge of mathematics, and he might have tion. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thom- boasted with Gibbon, but without the as Brown lectured on moral philosophy; qualification which Gibbon appended, that Playfair held the chair of natural philos- he had attained a stock of erudition that ophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir would have puzzled a doctor. Having John Leslie taught mathematics; and passed through the arts curriculum of the Dunbar was professor of Greek. They university, Carlyle ought, in the natural were a group of men likely to impress course of things, to have proceeded to much a susceptible lad of genius, and the study of theology, for he had been especially one who had a strong bias to- destined by his father to be a minister. wards mathematical studies. But Car- There is some tradition that matters had lyle was not so impressed. For Dr. gone so far that it had been arranged in Brown" Miss Brown," or "that little what church Carlyle should appear as a man who spouted poetry," as he derisively "probationer." But he did not carry out called him he had no liking. Against his father's intentions. "Now that I had Playfair he had a grudge, because, after gained man's estate," to quote his own having worked hard at the class studies, account of this crisis in his life, “I was on calling at Playfair's house for the cer- not sure that I believed the doctrines of tificate to which he was entitled, he found my father's kirk; and it was needful I the document worded in a somewhat nig- should now settle it. And so I entered gardly spirit. The only professor for my chamber and closed the door, and whom he seems to have had much regard around me there came a trooping throng was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of phantasms dire from the abysmal of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling depths of nethermost perdition; doubt, was returned. Carlyle made few friends fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing were at the university. He was lonely and there; and I wrestled with them in agony contemplative in his habits. He took no of spirit." The end of all this storm was part in the proceedings, and his name is the settled conviction that he could not not to be found on the list of members of enter the Church. Carlyle at once turned the Speculative Society, which every his hand to work by which he could earn clever student was then expected to join. his bread, and for a year or two he taught In after years he laid it down that "the mathematics in the burgh school of Äntrue university of these days is a collec- nan, where he had but lately been a pupil. tion of books," and on this principle he He remained there only two years; at acted. Not content with ransacking the their close he was appointed teacher of college library, he read all that was read- mathematics and classics in the burgh able in various circulating libraries · school of Kirkcaldy. At the other end among others, one founded by Allan Ram- of "the lang toun was a private advensay and acquired knowledge which ex- ture school, called the Academy, where tended far beyond the bounds of the Edward Irving taught some of the known university course. He left the univer- tongues and mathematics. The two sity with no regret. “Had you anywhere young men of genius were already acin Crim Tartary," he observes with refer- quainted with each other; indeed, it was ence to the university at which Teufels- at Irving's instigation, and with a view to dröckh studied, but probably with a cov- be near him, that Carlyle went to Kirkert glance at his own Alma Mater, "walled caldy. There, however, were riveted the in a square enclosure; furnished it with bonds of a friendship destined to be tested a small, ill-chosen library; and then by trials, some of them of a very personal turned loose into it eleven hundred Chris- character. These bonds were sometimes tian striplings, to tumble about as they list-stretched, but never broken, not even ed, from three to seven years; certain per- when Carlyle saw with sorrowfulness his sons, under the title of professors, being gifted friend pass into the regions of stationed at the gates, to declare aloud darkness and chaos whence he never rethat it was a University, and exact consid- turned. Teaching Fifeshire boys was not erable admission fees -you had not, in- Carlyle's vocation. After staying about deed, in mechanical structure, yet in spirit two years in Kirkcaldy he quitted it, leav