Note 32 — PART II.—1818–1822

The best account I ever had of Carlyle’s father was from an intelligent elderly gentleman who, having retired from business, amused himself one session, somewhere about or after 1857, by attending my class of English Literature in University College, London. He was from Dumfriesshire originally, and had known all the Carlyle family. He spoke more of Carlyle’s father than of Carlyle himself; and his first words to me about him were these:—“He was a most extraordinary man, Carlyle’s father: he said a thing, and it ran through the country.”——Carlyle often talked to me of his father, and always in the tone of the memoir in his Reminiscences, though I did not then know that he had any such memoir in writing. “He was a far cleverer man, my father, than I am or ever shall be,” was one of his phrases. He dwelt on what he thought a peculiar use by his father of the Scottish word gar, meaning “to compel,” as when he was reluctant to do a thing that must be done, and ended by saying he must “just gar himsel’ do it.” The expression was not new to me, for it is to be heard farther north than Annandale; but it seemed characteristic.—Of the strong and picturesque rhetoric of Carlyle’s father I remember two examples, told me, I think, by Mrs. Carlyle. Once, when he was going somewhere in a cart with his daughters on a rainy day, he was annoyed by the drip-dripping into his neck from the whalebone point of one of the umbrellas. “I would rather sit a’ nicht in my sark,” he said, “under a waterspout on the tap of ——” [some mountain in the neighbourhood, the name of which I forget]. Once, when his son, of whom he had become proud, was at home in a vacation, and a pious old neighbour-woman who had come in was exciting herself in a theological controversy with the Divinity student on some point or other, he broke out, “Thou auld crack-brained enthusiastic, dost thou think to argue wi’ our Tom?”