CARLYLE, Thomas, Scotch essayist, his torian and miscellaneous writer: b. Ecclefe chan, near Annandale, in Dumfriesshire, Scot land, 4 Dec. 1795; d. London, 4 Feb. 1881. Carlyle's ancestors were said to have come to Annandale from Carlisle, England, in the time of David II, but at the author's birth the im mediate family was living in very straitened cir cumstances at Ecclefechan, where the grand father, Thomas, was village carpenter and his five sons masons. The second of these, James, a man of "largest natural adornment,* assertive, choleric, honest and pious, with an uncommon gift of forcible expression, married as his second wife Margaret Aitken, a woman of affectionate nature and piety of mind. By her he had four sons and five daughters, of whom the eldest was Thomas. The third son, John Carlyle (q.v.), became distinguished as the translator of Dante. Thomas, like the other children, was brought up with much affectionate care. His parents intended him for the Church and gave him all the education in their power. He early learned his letters and soon became a voracious reader. At 10 he was sent to the grammar school at Annan, where, as a moody, sensitive child, he was much bullied by the other boys, and probably suffered acutely. At the age of 13 he was ready to enter Edinburgh University, which he attended from 1809 to 1814, without, however, taking a degree. His individuality did not readily allow itself to be molded to the academic routine. Finding him self unable, because of religious doubts, to enter the ministry, he went to Annan Academy as tutor in mathematics, in 1814. Later he .taught at Kirkcaldy, where he made the ac quaintance of Edward Irving (q.v). one of his warmest friends. Irving's friendship was of great value to Carlyle, and his library enabled the latter to gratify his love of reading and to mitigate the distaste which he felt for teaching. In October 1818 the work became so repellent that he resigned from his school, saying that "it were better to perish than to continue school-mastering." Then he went to Edinburgh
to try to earn his living.
The next three years were perhaps the most trying of his life. He was tormented to an un common degree by his lifelong enemy, dyspep sia, and as a result was greatly depressed in spirit. Uncertain what career to follow, trying his hand at many vocations and different studies, miserably poor, finding his only em ployment for a time in writing hack articles, he was °mentally and physically adrift" in the sense that is described in his °Everlasting No" of (Sartor Resartus.' Toward the middle of 1821, however, he seems, by much resolution and energy of will, to have shaken off much of the depression, to have attained the position of the "Everlasting Yea." The men who at this time most influenced him were the Ger mans, particularly Goethe, the mystic Richter, and the philosopher Fichte. German literature was now his most absorbing study, and later this study bore fruit in his