VOLUME V SLICE III Capefigue to Carneades (continued 10)

Though the majority of the ministers present favoured the Austrian interpretation of article XIII. as elaborated by Gentz, they were as little prepared as the representative of Württemberg to agree to any hasty measures for strengthening the federal government at the expense of the jealously guarded prerogatives of the minor sovereignties. The result was that the constitutional questions falling under the second class were reserved for further discussion at a general conference of German ministers to be summoned at Vienna later in the year. The effective Carlsbad resolutions, subsequently issued as laws by the federal diet, were therefore only those dealing with the curbing of the “revolutionary” agitation. For the results of their operation see Germany: History.

The acts, protocols and resolutions of the conference of Carlsbad are given in M. de Martens’s Nouveau Recueil général de traités, &c., t. 4, pp. 8-166 (Göttingen, 1846). An interesting criticism of the Carlsbad Decrees is appended (p. 166), addressed by Baron Hans von Gagern, Luxemburg representative in the federal diet, to Baron von Plessen, Mecklenburg plenipotentiary at the conference of Carlsbad.

(W. A. P.)

CARLSTADT, Karlstadt or Karolostadt (1480-1541), German reformer, whose real name was Andreas Rudolf Bodenstein, was born at Carlstadt in Bohemia. He entered the university of Erfurt in the winter term of 1499-1500, and remained there till 1503, when he went to Cologne. In the winter term of 1504-1505 he transferred himself to the newly founded university of Wittenberg, where he soon established his reputation as a teacher of philosophy, and a zealous champion of the scholastic system of Thomas Aquinas, against the revised nominalism associated with the name of Occam. In 1508 he was made canon of the Allerheiligenstift, a collegiate church incorporated in the university; and in 1510 he became doctor of theology and archdeacon, his duties being to preach, to say mass once a week and to lecture before the university; in 1513 he was appointed ordinary professor of theology. In 1515 he went to Rome, where with a view to becoming provost of the Allerheiligenstift he studied law, taking his degree as doctor juris utriusque. His experiences in the papal city produced upon him the same effect as upon Luther, and when in 1516 he returned to Germany it was as an ardent opponent of the Thomist philosophy and as a champion of the Augustinian doctrine of the impotence of the human will and salvation through Divine grace alone. The 151 theses of Carlstadt, dated the 16th of September 1516, discovered by Theodor Kolde (“Wittenberger Disputationsthesen” in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, xi. p. 448, &c.), prove that, so far from owing his change of view to Luther’s influence, he was at this time actually in advance of Luther. The two reformers were, in fact, never friends; though from the end of 1516 onwards the development of each was considerably influenced by the other.

In the spring of 1518, in reply to Eck’s Obelisci, an attack on Luther’s 95 theses, Carlstadt published a series of theses, maintaining the supremacy of the Holy Scriptures (which he regarded as verbally inspired) over ecclesiastical tradition and the authority of the fathers, and asserting the liability of general councils to error. Eck challenged him to a public disputation, in which Luther also took part, and which lasted from the 27th of June to the 15th of July 1519. In this dialectical warfare Carlstadt was no match for Eck; but the dispute only served to confirm him in his revolt from the dominant theology, and in three violent polemical treatises against Eck he proclaimed the doctrine of the exclusive operation of grace in the justification of believers.

This attitude led him in 1520, by a logical development, to an open attack on all those ecclesiastical practices in which the doctrine of justification by works had become crystallized; e.g. indulgences and the abuse of holy water and consecrated salt. At the same time he appeared as the first of modern biblical critics, denying the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and classing the Scriptures into three categories of different value in accordance with the degrees of certainty as to their traditional origin. He still, however, maintained the doctrine of verbal inspiration, and attacked Luther for rejecting the epistle of James. In 1520 Carlstadt’s name was included in the papal bull excommunicating Luther; after a momentary hesitation he decided to remain firm in his protestant attitude, published an appeal from the pope to a general council, and attacked the corruptions of the papacy itself in a treatise on “the holiness of the pope” (Von päpstlicher Heiligkeit, October 17th, 1520).

In May 1521 Carlstadt went to Denmark, on the invitation of King Christian II., to assist in the reform of the church; but his disposition was anything but conciliatory, and, though his influence is traceable in the royal law of the 26th of May 1521 abolishing the celibacy of the clergy, he was forced, by the hostility of nobles and clerics alike, to leave after a few weeks’ stay. In June he was back in Wittenberg, busy with tracts on the Holy Sacrament (he still believed in the corporeal presence) and against the celibacy of the clergy (de coelibatu). Carlstadt has been unjustly accused of being responsible for the riots against the Mass fomented by the Augustinian friars and the students; as a matter of fact, he did his best to keep the peace, pending a decision by the elector of Saxony and the authorities of the university, and it was not till Christmas day that he himself publicly communicated the laity under both species. The next day he announced his engagement to a young lady of noble family, Anna von Mochau.

From this moment Carlstadt was accepted as the leader of Protestantism in Wittenberg; and, at his instance, auricular confession, the elevation of the Host and the rules for fasting were abolished. On the 19th of January he was married, in the presence of many of the university professors and city magistrates. A few days later the property of the religious corporations was confiscated by the city and, after pensions had been assigned to their former members, was handed over to charitable foundations. A pronouncement of Carlstadt’s against pictures and images, supported by the town, also led to iconoclastic excesses.

The return of Luther early in March, however, ended Carlstadt’s supremacy. The elector Frederick the Wise was strenuously opposed to any alteration in the traditional services, and at his command Luther restored communion in one kind and the elevation of the Host. Carlstadt himself, though still professor, was deprived of all influence in practical affairs, and devoted himself entirely to theological speculation, which led him ever nearer to the position of the mystics. He now denied the necessity for a clerical order at all, called himself “a new layman,” doffed his ecclesiastical dress, and lived for a while as a peasant with his wife’s relations at Segrena. In the middle of 1523, however, he went to Orlamünde, a living held by him with his canonry, and there in the parish church reformed the services according to his ideas, abolishing the Mass and even preaching against the necessity for sacraments at all. He still continued occasionally to lecture at Wittenberg and to fulminate against Luther’s policy of compromise.

All this brought him into violent conflict with the elector, the university and Luther himself. His professorship and living were confiscated and, in September 1524, he went into exile with his wife and child. He was now exposed to great privations and hardships, but found opportunity for polemical writing, proclaiming for the first time his disbelief in the “Real Presence.” He preached wherever he could gain a hearing, and visited Strassburg, Heidelberg, Zürich, Basel, Schweinfurth, Kitzingen and Nördlingen, before he found a more permanent resting-place at Rothenburg on the Tauber. He was here when the Peasants’ War broke out, and was sent as a delegate to reason with the insurgents. His admonitions were unsuccessful, and he only succeeded in bringing himself under suspicion of being in part responsible for their excesses. When Rothenburg was taken by the margrave of Anspach (28th June 1525) Carlstadt had to fly for his life. His spirit was now broken, and from Frankfort he wrote to Luther humbly praying him to intercede for him with the elector. Luther agreed to do so, on receiving from Carlstadt a recantation of his heterodox views on the Lord’s Supper, and as the result the latter was permitted to return to Wittenberg (1525). He was not, however, allowed to lecture, and he lived as a peasant, first at Segrena and afterwards at Bergwitz, cultivating small properties, in which he had invested the remnant of his fortune, with such poor success that at the end of 1526 he had to eke out a living as a pedlar in the little town of Kemberg. This was endurable; but not so the demand presently made upon him to take up the cudgels against Zwingli and Oecolampadius. Once more he revolted; to agree with “Dr Martin’s opinions on the sacrament” was as difficult as flying like a bird; he appealed to the elector to allow him to leave Saxony; but the elector’s conscience was in Luther’s keeping, and Carlstadt had to fly ignominiously in order to avoid imprisonment. He escaped to Holstein, where in March 1529 he stayed with the Anabaptist Melchior Hofmann. Expelled by the authorities, he took refuge in East Friesland, where he remained till the beginning of 1530 under the protection of a nobleman in sympathy with the Helvetic reformers. His preaching gave him great influence, but towards the close of the year persecution again sent him on his travels. He ultimately reached Zürich, where the recommendations of Bucer and Oecolampadius secured him a friendly reception by Zwingli, who procured him employment. After Zwingli’s death he remained in close intercourse with the Zürich preachers, who defended him against renewed attacks on Luther’s part; and finally, in 1534, on Bullinger’s recommendation, he was called to Basel as preacher at the church of St Peter and professor at the university. Here he remained till his death on the 24th of December 1541.

During these latter years Carlstadt’s attitude became more moderate. His championship of the town council against the theocratic claims of Antistes Myconius and the ecclesiastical council, in the matter of the control of the university, was perhaps in consonance with his earlier views on the relations of clergy and laity. He was, however, also instrumental in restoring the abolished doctorate of theology and other degrees; and, despatched on a mission to Strassburg in 1536, to take part in a discussion on a proposed compromise in the matter of the Lord’s Supper between the theologians of Strassburg and Wittenberg, he displayed a conciliatory attitude which earned him the praise of Bucer. Carlstadt’s historical significance lies in the fact that he was one of the pioneers of the Reformation. But he was a thinker and dreamer rather than a man of affairs, and though he had the moral and physical courage to carry his principles to their logical conclusions (he was the first priest to write against celibacy, and the first to take a wife), he lacked the balance of mind and sturdy common sense that inspired Luther’s policy of consideration for “the weaker brethren” and built up the Evangelical Church on a conservative basis. But though Carlstadt was on friendly terms, and corresponded with Münzer and other Anabaptists, he did not share their antinomian views, nor was he responsible for their excesses. His opinion as to the relation of faith and “good works” was practically that expressed in articles XI. and XII. of the Church of England. In reply to Luther’s violent onslaught on him in his Wider die himmlischen Propheten he issued from Rothenburg his Anzeig etlicher Hauptartikel christlicher Lehre, a compendious exposition of his views, in which he says: “Those who urge to good works do so, not that the conscience may be justified by works, but that their freedom may redound to God’s glory and that their neighbours may be fired to praise God.”

See C.F. Jaeger, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (Stuttgart, 1856); Hermann Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, vol. i. (Leipzig, 1905).

CARLYLE, ALEXANDER (1722-1805), Scottish divine, was born on the 26th of January 1722, in Dumfriesshire, and passed his youth and early manhood at Prestonpans, where he witnessed the battle of 1745. He was educated at Edinburgh (M.A. 1743), Glasgow and Leiden. From 1748 until his death on the 28th of August 1805 he was minister at Inveresk in Midlothian, and during this long career rose to high eminence in his church not only as leader of the moderate or “broad” Church section, but as moderator of the General Assembly 1770 and dean of the Chapel Royal in 1789. His influence was enhanced by his personal appearance, which was so striking as to earn him the name of “Jupiter Carlyle”; and his autobiography (published 1860), though written in his closing years and not extending beyond the year 1770, is abundantly interesting as a picture of Scottish life, social and ecclesiastical, in the 18th century. Carlyle’s memory recalled the Porteous Riots of 1736, and less remotely his friendship with Adam Smith, David Hume, and John Home, the dramatist, for witnessing the performance of whose tragedy Douglas he was censured in 1757. He was distinctly a bon vivant, but withal an upright, conscientious and capable minister.

CARLYLE, JOSEPH DACRE (1759-1804), British orientalist, was born in 1759 at Carlisle, where his father was a physician. He went in 1775 to Cambridge, was elected a fellow of Queens’ College in 1779, taking the degree of B.D. in 1793. With the assistance of a native of Bagdad known in England as David Zamio, then resident at Cambridge, he attained great proficiency in Arabic literature; and after succeeding Dr Paley in the chancellorship of Carlisle, he was appointed, in 1795, professor of Arabic in Cambridge University. His translation from the Arabic of Yusuf ibn Taghri Birdi, the Rerum Egypticarum Annales, appeared in 1792, and in 1796 a volume of Specimens of Arabic Poetry, from the earliest times to the fall of the Caliphate, with some account of the authors. Carlyle was appointed chaplain by Lord Elgin to the embassy at Constantinople in 1799, and prosecuted his researches in Eastern literature in a tour through Asia Minor, Palestine, Greece and Italy, collecting in his travels several valuable Greek and Syriac MSS. for a projected critical edition of the New Testament, collated with the Syriac and other versions—a work, however, which he did not live to complete. On his return to England in 1801 he was presented by the bishop of Carlisle to the living of Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he died on the 12th of April 1804. After his death there appeared a volume of poems descriptive of the scenes of his travels, with prefaces extracted from his journal. Among other works which he left unfinished was an edition of the Bible in Arabic, completed by H. Ford and published in 1811.

CARLYLE, THOMAS (1795-1881), British essayist, historian and philosopher, born on the 4th of December 1795 at Ecclefechan, in Annandale, was the eldest of the nine children of James Carlyle by his second wife, Janet Aitken. The father was by trade a mason, and afterwards a small farmer. He had joined a sect of seceders from the kirk, and had all the characteristics of the typical Scottish Calvinist. He was respected for his integrity and independence, and a stern outside covered warm affections. The family tie between all the Carlyles was unusually strong, and Thomas regarded his father with a reverence which found forcible expression in his Reminiscences. He always showed the tenderest love for his mother, and was the best of brothers. The narrow means of his parents were made sufficient by strict frugality. He was sent to the parish school when seven, and to Annan grammar-school when ten years old. His pugnacity brought him into troubles with his fellows at Annan; but he soon showed an appetite for learning which induced his father to educate him for the ministry. He walked to Edinburgh in November 1809, and entered the university. He cared little for any of the professors, except Sir John Leslie, from whom he learned some mathematics. He acquired a little classical knowledge, but the most valuable influence was that of his contemporaries. A few lads in positions similar to his own began to look up to him as an intellectual leader, and their correspondence with him shows remarkable interest in literary matters. In 1814 Carlyle, still looking forward to the career of a minister, obtained the mathematical mastership at Annan. The salary of £60 or £70 a year enabled him to save a little money. He went to Edinburgh once or twice, to deliver the discourses required from students of divinity. He does not seem, however, to have taken to his profession very earnestly. He was too shy and proud to see many of the Annan people, and found his chief solace in reading such books as he could get. In 1816 he was appointed, through the recommendation of Leslie, to a school at Kirkcaldy, where Edward Irving, Carlyle’s senior by three years, was also master of a school. Irving’s severity as a teacher had offended some of the parents, who set up Carlyle to be his rival. A previous meeting with Irving, also a native of Annan, had led to a little passage of arms, but Irving now welcomed Carlyle with a generosity which entirely won his heart, and the rivals soon became the closest of friends. The intimacy, affectionately commemorated in the Reminiscences, was of great importance to Carlyle’s whole career. “But for Irving,” he says, “I had never known what the communion of man with man means.” Irving had a library, in which Carlyle devoured Gibbon and much French literature, and they made various excursions together. Carlyle did his duties as a schoolmaster punctiliously, but found the life thoroughly uncongenial. No man was less fitted by temperament for the necessary drudgery and worry. A passing admiration for a Miss Gordon is supposed to have suggested the “Blumine” of Sartor Resartus; but he made no new friendships, and when Irving left at the end of 1818 Carlyle also resigned his post.

He had by this time resolved to give up the ministry. He has given no details of the intellectual change which alienated him from the church. He had, however, been led, by whatever process, to abandon the dogmatic system of his forefathers, though he was and always remained in profound sympathy with the spirit of their teaching. A period of severe struggle followed. He studied law for a time, but liked it no better than schoolmastering. He took a pupil or two, and wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia under the editorship of Brewster. He occasionally visited his family, and their unfailing confidence helped to keep up his courage. Meanwhile he was going through a spiritual crisis. Atheism seemed for a time to be the only alternative to his old creed. It was, however, profoundly repugnant to him. At last, one day in June 1821, after three weeks’ total sleeplessness, he went through the crisis afterwards described quite “literally” in Sartor Resartus. He cast out the spirit of negation, and henceforth the temper of his misery was changed to one, not of “whining,” but of “indignation and grim fire-eyed defiance.” That, he says, was his spiritual new-birth, though certainly not into a life of serenity. The conversion was coincident with Carlyle’s submission to a new and very potent influence. In 1819 he had begun to study German, with which he soon acquired a very remarkable familiarity. Many of his contemporaries were awakening to the importance of German thought, and Carlyle’s knowledge enabled him before long to take a conspicuous part in diffusing the new intellectual light. The chief object of his reverence was Goethe. In many most important respects no two men could be more unlike; but, for the present, Carlyle seems to have seen in Goethe a proof that it was possible to reject outworn dogmas without sinking into materialism. Goethe, by singularly different methods, had emerged from a merely negative position into a lofty and coherent conception of the universe. Meanwhile, Carlyle’s various anxieties were beginning to be complicated by physical derangement. A rat, he declared, was gnawing at the pit of his stomach. He was already suffering from the ailments, whatever their precise nature, from which he never escaped. He gave vent to his irritability by lamentations so grotesquely exaggerated as to make it difficult to estimate the real extent of the evil.

Irving’s friendship now became serviceable. Carlyle’s confession of the radical difference of religious opinion had not alienated his friend, who was settling in London, and used his opportunities for promoting Carlyle’s interest. In January 1822 Carlyle, through Irving’s recommendation, became tutor to Charles and Arthur Buller, who were to be students at Edinburgh. Carlyle’s salary was £200 a year, and this, with the proceeds of some literary work, enabled him at once to help his brother John to study medicine and his brother Alexander to take up a farm. Carlyle spent some time with the elder Bullers, but found a life of dependence upon fashionable people humiliating and unsatisfactory. He employed himself at intervals upon a life of Schiller and a translation of Wilhelm Meister. He received £50 for a translation of Legendre’s Geometry; and an introduction, explaining the theory of proportion, is said by De Morgan to show that he could have gained distinction as an expounder of mathematical principles. He finally gave up his tutorship in July 1824, and for a time tried to find employment in London. The impressions made upon him by London men of letters were most unfavourable. Carlyle felt by this time conscious of having a message to deliver to mankind, and his comrades, he thought, were making literature a trade instead of a vocation, and prostituting their talents to frivolous journalism. He went once to see Coleridge, who was then delivering his oracular utterances at Highgate, and the only result was the singularly vivid portrait given in a famous chapter in his life of Sterling. Coleridge seemed to him to be ineffectual as a philosopher, and personally to be a melancholy instance of genius running to waste. Carlyle, conscious of great abilities, and impressed by such instances of the deleterious effects of the social atmosphere of London, resolved to settle in his native district. There he could live frugally and achieve some real work. He could, for one thing, be the interpreter of Germany to England. A friendly letter from Goethe, acknowledging the translation of Wilhelm Meister, reached him at the end of 1824 and greatly encouraged him. Goethe afterwards spoke warmly of the life of Schiller, and desired it to be translated into German. Letters occasionally passed between them in later years, which were edited by Professor Charles Eliot Norton in 1887. Goethe received Carlyle’s homage with kind complacency. The gift of a seal to Goethe on his birthday in 1831 “from fifteen English friends,” including Scott and Wordsworth, was suggested and carried out by Carlyle. The interest in German, which Carlyle did so much to promote, suggested to him other translations and reviews during the next few years, and he made some preparations for a history of German literature. British curiosity, however, about such matters seems to have been soon satisfied, and the demand for such work slackened.

Carlyle was meanwhile passing through the most important crisis of his personal history. Jane Baillie Welsh, born 1801, was the only child of Dr Welsh of Haddington. She had shown precocious talent, and was sent to the school at Haddington where Edward Irving (q.v.) was a master. After her father’s death in 1819 she lived with her mother, and her wit and beauty attracted many admirers. Her old tutor, Irving, was now at Kirkcaldy, where he became engaged to a Miss Martin. He visited Haddington occasionally in the following years, and a strong mutual regard arose between him and Miss Welsh. They contemplated a marriage, and Irving endeavoured to obtain a release from his previous engagement. The Martin family held him to his word, and he took a final leave of Miss Welsh in 1822. Meanwhile he had brought Carlyle from Edinburgh and introduced him to the Welshes. Carlyle was attracted by the brilliant abilities of the young lady, procured books for her and wrote letters to her as an intellectual guide. The two were to perform a new variation upon the theme of Abelard and Héloïse. [A good deal of uncertainty long covered the precise character of their relations. Until 1909, when Mr. Alexander Carlyle published his edition of the “love-letters,” the full material was not accessible; they had been read by Carlyle’s biographer, Froude, and also by Professor Charles Norton, and Norton (in his edition of Carlyle’s Early Letters, 1886) declared that Froude had distorted the significance of this correspondence in a sense injurious to the writers. The publication of the letters certainly seems to justify Norton’s view.] Miss Welsh’s previous affair with Irving had far less importance than Froude ascribes to it; and she soon came to regard her past love as a childish fancy. She recognized Carlyle’s vast intellectual superiority, and the respect gradually deepened into genuine love. The process, however, took some time. Her father had bequeathed to her his whole property (£200 to £300 a year). In 1823 she made it over to her mother, but left the whole to Carlyle in the event of her own and her mother’s death. She still declared that she did not love him well enough to become his wife. In 1824 she gradually relented so far as to say that she would marry if he could achieve independence. She had been brought up in a station superior to that of the Carlyles, and could not accept the life of hardship which would be necessary in his present circumstances. Carlyle, accustomed to his father’s household, was less frightened by the prospect of poverty. He was determined not to abandon his vocation as a man of genius by following the lower though more profitable paths to literary success, and expected that his wife should partake the necessary sacrifice of comfort. The natural result of such discussions followed. The attraction became stronger on both sides, in spite of occasional spasms of doubt. An odd incident precipitated the result. A friend of Irving’s, Mrs Basil Montague, wrote to Miss Welsh, to exhort her to suppress her love for Irving, who had married Miss Martin in 1823. Miss Welsh replied by announcing her intention to marry Carlyle; and then told him the whole story, of which he had previously been ignorant. He properly begged her not to yield to the impulse without due consideration. She answered by coming at once to his father’s house, where he was staying; and the marriage was finally settled. It took place on the 17th of October 1826.

Carlyle had now to arrange the mode of life which should enable him to fulfil his aspiration. His wife had made over her income to her mother, but he had saved a small sum upon which to begin housekeeping. A passing suggestion from Mrs Carlyle that they might live with her mother was judiciously abandoned. Carlyle had thought of occupying Craigenputtock, a remote and dreary farm belonging to Mrs Welsh. His wife objected his utter incapacity as a farmer; and they finally took a small house at Comely Bank, Edinburgh, where they could live on a humble scale. The brilliant conversation of both attracted some notice in the literary society of Edinburgh. The most important connexion was with Francis, Lord Jeffrey, still editor of the Edinburgh Review. Though Jeffrey had no intellectual sympathy with Carlyle, he accepted some articles for the Review and became warmly attached to Mrs Carlyle. Carlyle began to be known as leader of a new “mystic” school, and his earnings enabled him to send his brother John to study in Germany. The public appetite, however, for “mysticism” was not keen. In spite of support from Jeffrey and other friends, Carlyle failed in a candidature for a professorship at St Andrews. His brother, Alexander, had now taken the farm at Craigenputtock, and the Carlyles decided to settle at the separate dwelling-house there, which would bring them nearer to Mrs Welsh. They went there in 1828, and began a hard struggle. Carlyle, indomitably determined to make no concessions for immediate profit, wrote slowly and carefully, and turned out some of his most finished work. He laboured “passionately” at Sartor Resartus, and made articles out of fragments originally intended for the history of German literature. The money difficulty soon became more pressing. John, whom he was still helping, was trying unsuccessfully to set up as a doctor in London; and Alexander’s farming failed. In spite of such drawbacks, Carlyle in later years looked back upon the life at Craigenputtock as on the whole a comparatively healthy and even happy period, as it was certainly one of most strenuous and courageous endeavour. Though often absorbed in his work and made both gloomy and irritable by his anxieties, he found relief in rides with his wife, and occasionally visiting their relations. Their letters during temporary separations are most affectionate. The bleak climate, however, the solitude, and the necessity of managing a household with a single servant, were excessively trying to a delicate woman, though Mrs Carlyle concealed from her husband the extent of her sacrifices. The position was gradually becoming untenable. In the autumn of 1831 Carlyle was forced to accept a loan of £50 from Jeffrey, and went in search of work to London, whither his wife followed him. He made some engagements with publishers, though no one would take Sartor Resartus, and returned to Craigenputtock in the spring of 1832. Jeffrey, stimulated perhaps by his sympathy for Mrs Carlyle, was characteristically generous. Besides pressing loans upon both Thomas and John Carlyle, he offered to settle an annuity of £100 upon Thomas, and finally enabled John to support himself by recommending him to a medical position.1 Carlyle’s proud spirit of independence made him reject Jeffrey’s help as long as possible; and even his acknowledgment of the generosity (in the Reminiscences) is tinged with something disagreeably like resentment. In 1834 he applied to Jeffrey for a post at the Edinburgh Observatory. Jeffrey naturally declined to appoint a man who, in spite of some mathematical knowledge, had no special qualification, and administered a general lecture upon Carlyle’s arrogance and eccentricity which left a permanent sense of injury.

In the beginning of 1833 the Carlyles made another trial of Edinburgh. There Carlyle found materials in the Advocates’ Library for the article on the Diamond Necklace, one of his most perfect writings, which led him to study the history of the French Revolution. Sartor Resartus was at last appearing in Fraser’s Magazine, though the rate of payment was cut down, and the publisher reported that it was received with “unqualified dissatisfaction.” Edinburgh society did not attract him, and he retreated once more to Craigenputtock. After another winter the necessity of some change became obvious. The Carlyles resolved to “burn their ships.” They went to London in the summer of 1834, and took a house at 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea, which Carlyle inhabited till his death; the house has since been bought for the public. Irving, who had welcomed him on former occasions, was just dying,—a victim, as Carlyle thought, to fashionable cajoleries. A few young men were beginning to show appreciation. J.S. Mill had made Carlyle’s acquaintance in the previous visit to London, and had corresponded with him. Mill had introduced Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited Craigenputtock in 1833. Carlyle was charmed with Emerson, and their letters published by Professor Norton show that his regard never cooled. Emerson’s interest showed that Carlyle’s fame was already spreading in America. Carlyle’s connexion with Charles Buller, a zealous utilitarian, introduced him to the circle of “philosophical radicals.”

Carlyle called himself in some sense a radical; and J.S. Mill, though not an intellectual disciple, was a very warm admirer of his friend’s genius. Carlyle had some expectation of the editorship of the London Review, started by Sir W. Molesworth at this time as an organ of philosophical radicalism. The combination would clearly have been explosive. Meanwhile Mill, who had collected many books upon the French Revolution, was eager to help Carlyle in the history which he was now beginning. He set to work at once and finished the first volume in five months. The manuscript, while entrusted to Mill for annotation, was burnt by an accident. Mill induced Carlyle to accept in compensation £100, which was urgently needed. Carlyle took up the task again and finished the whole on the 12th of January 1837. “I can tell the world,” he said to his wife, “you have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man. Do what you like with it, you—”

The publication, six months later, of the French Revolution marks the turning-point of Carlyle’s career. Many readers hold it to be the best, as it is certainly the most characteristic, of Carlyle’s books. The failure of Sartor Resartus to attract average readers is quite intelligible. It contains, indeed, some of the most impressive expositions of his philosophical position, and some of his most beautiful and perfectly written passages. But there is something forced and clumsy, in spite of the flashes of grim humour, in the machinery of the Clothes Philosophy. The mannerism, which has been attributed to an imitation of Jean Paul, appeared to Carlyle himself to be derived rather from the phrases current in his father’s house, and in any case gave an appropriate dialect for the expression of his peculiar idiosyncrasy. But it could not be appreciated by readers who would not take the trouble to learn a new language. In the French Revolution Carlyle had discovered his real strength. He was always at his best when his imagination was set to work upon a solid framework of fact. The book shows a unique combination: on the one hand is the singularly shrewd insight into character and the vivid realization of the picturesque; on the other is the “mysticism” or poetical philosophy which relieves the events against a background of mystery. The contrast is marked by the humour which seems to combine a cynical view of human folly with a deeply pathetic sense of the sadness and suffering of life. The convictions, whatever their value, came, as he said, “flamingly from the heart.” It was, of course, impossible for Carlyle to satisfy modern requirements of matter-of-fact accuracy. He could not in the time have assimilated all the materials even then extant, and later accumulations would necessitate a complete revision. Considered as a “prose epic,” or a vivid utterance of the thought of the period, it has a permanent and unique value.

The book was speedily successful. It was reviewed by Mill in the Westminster and by Thackeray in The Times, and Carlyle, after a heroic struggle, was at last touching land. In each of the years 1837 to 1840 he gave a course of lectures, of which the last only (upon “Hero Worship”) was published; they materially helped his finances. By Emerson’s management he also received something during the same period from American publishers. At the age of forty-five he had thus become independent. He had also established a position among the chief writers of the day. Young disciples, among whom John Sterling was the most accepted, were gathering round him, and he became an object of social curiosity. Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), who won universal popularity by the most genuine kindliness of nature, became a cordial friend. Another important intimacy was with the Barings, afterwards Lord and Lady Ashburton. Carlyle’s conversational powers were extraordinary; though, as he won greater recognition as a prophet, he indulged too freely in didactic monologue. In his prophetic capacity he published two remarkable books: Chartism (1829), enlarged from an article which Lockhart, though personally approving, was afraid to take for the Quarterly; and Past and Present (1843), in which the recently published Mediaeval Chronicle was taken as a text for the exposure of modern evils. They may be regarded as expositions of the doctrine implicitly set forth in the French Revolution. Carlyle was a “radical” as sharing the sentiments of the class in which he was born. He had been profoundly moved by the widely-spread distresses in his earlier years. When the yeomanry were called out to suppress riots after the Peace, his sympathies were with the people rather than with the authorities. So far he was in harmony with Mill and the “philosophical radicals.” A fundamental divergence of principle, however, existed and was soon indicated by his speedy separation from the party and alienation from Mill himself. The Revolution, according to him, meant the sweeping away of effete beliefs and institutions, but implied also the necessity of a reconstructive process. Chartism begins with a fierce attack upon the laissez faire theory, which showed blindness to this necessity. The prevalent political economy, in which that theory was embodied, made a principle of neglecting the very evils which it should be the great function of government to remedy. Carlyle’s doctrines, entirely opposed to the ordinary opinions of Whigs and Radicals, found afterwards an expositor in his ardent disciple Ruskin, and have obvious affinities with more recent socialism. At the time he was as one crying in the wilderness to little practical purpose. Liberals were scandalized by his apparent identification of “right” with “might,” implied in the demand for a strong government; and though he often declared the true interpretation to be that the right would ultimately become might, his desire for strong government seemed too often to sanction the inverse view. He came into collision with philanthropists, and was supposed to approve of despotism for its own sake.

His religious position was equally unintelligible to the average mind. While unequivocally rejecting the accepted creeds, and so scandalizing even liberal theologians, he was still more hostile to simply sceptical and materialist tendencies. He was, as he called himself, a “mystic”; and his creed was too vague to be put into any formula beyond a condemnation of atheism. One corollary was the famous doctrine of “hero worship” first expounded in his lectures. Any philosophy of history which emphasized the importance of general causes seemed to him to imply a simply mechanical doctrine and to deny the efficacy of the great spiritual forces. He met it by making biography the essence of history, or attributing all great events to the “heroes,” who are the successive embodiments of divine revelations. This belief was implied in his next great work, the Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell, published in 1845. The great Puritan hero was a man after his own heart, and the portrait drawn by so sympathetic a writer is not only intensely vivid, but a very effective rehabilitation of misrepresented character. The “biographical” view of history, however, implies the weakness, not only of unqualified approval of all Cromwell’s actions, but of omitting any attempt to estimate the Protector’s real relation to the social and political development of the time. The question, what was Cromwell’s real and permanent achievement, is not answered nor distinctly considered. The effect may be partly due to the peculiar form of the book as a detached series of documents and comments. The composition introduced Carlyle to the “Dryasdust” rubbish heaps of which he here and ever afterwards bitterly complained. A conscientious desire to unearth the facts, and the effort of extracting from the dullest records the materials for graphic pictures, made the process of production excessively painful. For some years after Cromwell Carlyle wrote little. His growing acceptance by publishers, and the inheritance of her property by Mrs Carlyle on her mother’s death in 1842, finally removed the stimulus of money pressure. He visited Ireland in 1846 and again in 1849, when he made a long tour in company with Sir C. Gavan Duffy, then a young member of the Nationalist party (see Sir C.G. Duffy’s Conversations with Carlyle, 1892, for an interesting narrative). Carlyle’s strong convictions as to the misery and misgovernment of Ireland recommended him to men who had taken part in the rising of 1848. Although the remedies acceptable to a eulogist of Cromwell could not be to their taste, they admired his moral teaching; and he received their attentions, as Sir C.G. Duffy testifies, with conspicuous courtesy. His aversion from the ordinary radicalism led to an article upon slavery in 1849, to which Mill replied, and which caused their final alienation. It was followed in 1850 by the Latterday Pamphlets, containing “sulphurous” denunciations of the do-nothing principle. They gave general offence, and the disapproval, according to Froude, stopped the sale for years. The Life of Sterling (d. 1844), which appeared in 1851, was intended to correct the life by Julius Hare, which had given too much prominence to theological questions. The subject roused Carlyle’s tenderest mood, and the Life is one of the most perfect in the language.

Carlyle meanwhile was suffering domestic troubles, unfortunately not exceptional in their nature, though the exceptional intellect and characters of the persons concerned have given them unusual prominence. Carlyle’s constitutional irritability made him intensely sensitive to petty annoyances. He suffered the torments of dyspepsia; he was often sleepless, and the crowing of “demon-fowls” in neighbours’ yards drove him wild. Composition meant for him intense absorption in his work; solitude and quiet were essential; and he resented interruptions by grotesque explosions of humorously exaggerated wrath. Mrs Carlyle had to pass many hours alone, and the management of the household and of devices intended to shield him from annoyances was left entirely to her. House-cleanings and struggles with builders during the construction of a “sound-proof room” taxed her energy, while Carlyle was hiding himself with his family in Scotland or staying at English country houses. Nothing could be more affectionate than his behaviour to his wife on serious occasions, such as the death of her mother, and he could be considerate when his attention was called to the facts. But he was often oblivious to the strain upon her energies, and had little command of his temper. An unfortunate aggravation of the difficulty arose from his intimacy with the Ashburtons. Lady Ashburton, a woman of singular social charm and great ability, appreciated the author, but apparently accepted the company of the author’s wife rather as a necessity than as an additional charm. Mrs Carlyle was hurt by the fine lady’s condescension and her husband’s accessibility to aristocratic blandishments. Carlyle, as a wise man, should have yielded to his wife’s wishes; unluckily, he was content to point out that her jealousy was unreasonable, and, upon that very insufficient ground, to disregard it and to continue his intimacy with the Ashburtons on the old terms. Mrs Carlyle bitterly resented his conduct. She had been willing to renounce any aspirations of her own and to sink herself in his glory, but she naturally expected him to recognize her devotion and to value her society beyond all others. She had just cause of complaint, and a remarkable power, as her letters prove, of seeing things plainly and despising sentimental consolations. She was childless, and had time to brood over her wrongs. She formed a little circle of friends, attached to her rather than to her husband; and to one of them, Giuseppe Mazzini, she confided her troubles in 1846. He gave her admirable advice; and the alienation from her husband, though it continued still to smoulder, led to no further results. A journal written at the same time gives a painful record of her sufferings, and after her death made Carlyle conscious for the first time of their full extent. The death of Lady Ashburton in 1857 removed this cause of jealousy; and Lord Ashburton married a second wife in 1858, who became a warm friend of both Carlyles. The cloud which had separated them was thus at last dispersed. Meanwhile Carlyle had become absorbed in his best and most laborious work. Soon after the completion of the Cromwell he had thought of Frederick for his next hero, and had in 1845 contemplated a visit to Germany to collect materials. He did not, however, settle down finally to the work till 1851. He shut himself up in his study to wrestle with the Prussian Dryasdusts, whom he discovered to be as wearisome as their Puritan predecessors and more voluminous. He went to Scotland to see his mother, to whom he had always shown the tenderest affection, on her deathbed at the end of 1853. He returned to shut himself up in the “sound-proof room.” He twice visited Germany (1852 and 1858) to see Frederick’s battlefields and obtain materials; and he occasionally went to the Ashburtons and his relations in Scotland. The first two volumes of Frederick the Great appeared in 1858, and succeeding volumes in 1862, 1864 and 1865. The success was great from the first, though it did little to clear up Carlyle’s gloom. The book is in some respects his masterpiece, and its merits are beyond question. Carlyle had spared no pains in research. The descriptions of the campaigns are admirably vivid, and show his singular eye for scenery. These narratives are said to be used by military students in Germany, and at least convince the non-military student that he can understand the story. The book was declared by Emerson to be the wittiest ever written. Many episodes, describing the society at the Prussian court and the relations of Frederick to Voltaire, are unsurpassable as humorous portraiture. The effort to fuse the masses of raw material into a well-proportioned whole is perhaps not quite successful; and Carlyle had not the full sympathy with Frederick which had given interest to the Cromwell. A hero-worshipper with half-concealed doubts as to his hero is in an awkward position. Carlyle’s general conception of history made him comparatively blind to aspects of the subject which would, to writers of other schools, have a great importance. The extraordinary power of the book is undeniable, though it does not show the fire which animated the French Revolution. A certain depression and weariness of spirit darken the general tone.

During the later labours Mrs Carlyle’s health had been breaking. Carlyle, now that happier relations had been restored, did his best to give her the needed comforts; and in spite of his immersion in Frederick, showed her all possible attention in later years. She had apparently recovered from an almost hopeless illness, when at the end of 1865 he was elected to the rectorship of the university of Edinburgh. He delivered an address there on the 2nd of April 1866, unusually mild in tone, and received with general applause. He was still detained in Scotland when Mrs Carlyle died suddenly while driving in her carriage. The immediate cause was the shock of an accident to her dog. She had once hurt her mother’s feelings by refusing to use some wax candles. She had preserved them ever since, and by her direction they were now lighted in the chamber of death. Carlyle was overpowered by her loss. His life thenceforward became more and more secluded, and he gradually became incapable of work. He went to Mentone in the winter of 1866 and began the Reminiscences. He afterwards annotated the letters from his wife, published (1883) as Letters and Memorials. He was, as Froude says, impressed by the story of Johnson’s “penance” at Uttoxeter, and desired to make a posthumous confession of his shortcomings in his relations to his wife. A few later utterances made known his opinions of current affairs. He joined the committee for the defence of Governor Eyre in 1867; he also wrote in 1867 an article upon “shooting Niagara,” that is, upon the tendency of the Reform Bill of that year; and in 1870 he wrote a letter defending the German case against France. The worth of his Frederick was acknowledged by the Prussian Order of Merit in 1874. In the same year Disraeli offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath and a pension. He declined very courteously, and felt some regret for previous remarks upon the minister. The length of his literary career was now softening old antipathies, and he was the object of general respect. His infirmities enforced a very retired life, but he was constantly visited by Froude, and occasionally by his disciple Ruskin. A small number of other friends paid him constant attention. His conversation was still interesting, especially when it turned upon his recollections, and though his judgments were sometimes severe enough, he never condescended to the scandalous. His views of the future were gloomy. The world seemed to be going from bad to worse, with little heed to his warnings. He would sometimes regret that it was no longer permissible to leave it in the old Roman fashion. He sank gradually, and died on the 4th of February 1881. A place in Westminster Abbey was offered, but he was buried, according to his own desire, by the side of his parents at Ecclefechan. He left Craigenputtock, which had become his own property, to found bursaries at the university of Edinburgh. He gave his books to Harvard College.

Carlyle’s appearance has been made familiar by many portraits, none of them, according to Froude, satisfactory. The statue by Boehm on the Chelsea Embankment, however, is characteristic; and there is a fine painting by Watts in the National Portrait Gallery. J. McNeill Whistler’s portrait of him is in the possession of the Glasgow corporation.

During Carlyle’s later years the antagonism roused by his attacks upon popular opinions had subsided; and upon his death general expression was given to the emotions natural upon the loss of a remarkable man of genius. The rapid publication of the Reminiscences by Froude produced a sudden revulsion of feeling. Carlyle became the object of general condemnation. Froude’s biography, and the Memorials of Mrs Carlyle, published soon afterwards, strengthened the hostile feeling. Carlyle had appended to the Reminiscences an injunction to his friends not to publish them as they stood, and added that no part could ever be published without the strictest editing. Afterwards, when he had almost forgotten what he had written, he verbally empowered Froude to use his own judgment: Froude accordingly published the book at once, without any editing, and with many inaccuracies. Omissions of a few passages written from memory at a time of profound nervous depression would have altered the whole character of the book. Froude in this and the later publications held that he was giving effect to Carlyle’s wish to imitate Johnson’s “penance.” No one, said Boswell, should persuade him to make his lion into a cat. Froude intended, in the same spirit, to give the shades as well as the lights in the portrait of his hero. His admiration for Carlyle probably led him to assume too early that his readers would approach the story from the same point of view, that is, with an admiration too warm to be repelled by the admissions. Moreover, Froude’s characteristic desire for picturesque effect, unchecked by any painstaking accuracy, led to his reading preconceived impressions into his documents. The result was that Carlyle was too often judged by his defects, and regarded as a selfish and eccentric misanthrope with flashes of genius, rather than as a man with many of the highest qualities of mind and character clouded by constitutional infirmities. Yet it would be difficult to speak too strongly of the great qualities which underlay the superficial defects. Through long years of poverty and obscurity Carlyle showed unsurpassed fidelity to his vocation and superiority to the lower temptations which have ruined so many literary careers, His ambition might be interpreted as selfishness, but certainly showed no coldness of heart. His unstinted generosity to his brothers during his worst times is only one proof of the singular strength of his family affections. No one was more devoted to such congenial friends as Irving and Sterling. He is not the only man whom absorption in work and infirmity of temper have made into a provoking husband, though few wives have had Mrs Carlyle’s capacity for expressing the sense of injustice. The knowledge that the deepest devotion underlies misunderstandings is often a very imperfect consolation; but such devotion clearly existed all through, and proves the defect to have been relatively superficial.

The harsh judgments of individuals in the Reminiscences had no parallel in his own writings. He scarcely ever mentions a contemporary, and was never involved in a personal controversy. But the harshness certainly reflects a characteristic attitude of mind. Carlyle was throughout a pessimist or a prophet denouncing a backsliding world. His most popular contemporaries seemed to him to be false guides, and charlatans had ousted the heroes. The general condemnation of “shams” and cant had, of course, particular applications, though he left them to be inferred by his readers. Carlyle was the exponent of many of the deepest convictions of his time. Nobody could be more in sympathy with aspirations for a spiritual religion and for a lofty idealism in political and social life. To most minds, however, which cherish such aspirations the gentler optimism of men like Emerson was more congenial. They believed in the progress of the race and the triumph of the nobler elements. Though Carlyle, especially in his earlier years, could deliver an invigorating and encouraging, if not a sanguine doctrine, his utterances were more generally couched in the key of denunciation, and betrayed a growing despondency. Materialism and low moral principles seemed to him to be gaining the upper hand; and the hope that religion might survive the “old clothes” in which it had been draped seemed to grow fainter. The ordinary mind complained that he had no specific remedy to propose for the growing evils of the time; and the more cultivated idealist was alienated by the gloom and the tendency to despair. To a later generation it will probably appear that, whatever the exaggerations and the misconceptions to which he was led, his vehement attacks at least called attention to rather grave limitations and defects in the current beliefs and social tendencies of the time. The mannerisms and grotesque exaggerations of his writings annoyed persons of refinement, and suggest Matthew Arnold’s advice to flee “Carlylese” as you would flee the devil. Yet the shrewd common-sense, the biting humour, the power of graphic description and the imaginative “mysticism” give them a unique attraction for many even who do not fully sympathize with the implied philosophy or with the Puritanical code of ethics. The letters and autobiographical writings, whether they attract or repel sympathy, are at least a series of documents of profound interest for any one who cares to study character, and display an almost unique idiosyncrasy.

(L. S.)

The chief authorities for Carlyle’s life are his own Reminiscences, the Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle, the Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh (ed. A. Carlyle), and the four volumes of J.A. Froude’s biography; Froude was Carlyle’s literary executor. Prof. C.E. Norton’s edition of the Reminiscences and his collection of Carlyle’s Early Letters correct some of Froude’s inaccuracies. A list of many articles upon Carlyle is given by Mr Ireland in Notes and Queries, sixth series, vol. iv. Among other authors may be noticed Henry James, sen., in Literary Remains; Prof. Masson, Carlyle, Personally and in his Writings; Conway, Thomas Carlyle; Larkin, The Open Secret of Carlyle’s Life; Mrs Oliphant in Macmillan’s Magazine for April 1881; G.S. Venables in Fortnightly Review for May 1883 and November 1884. A good deal of controversy has arisen relating to Froude’s treatment of the relations between Carlyle and his wife, and during 1903-1904 this was pushed to a somewhat unsavoury extent. Those who are curious to pry into the question of Carlyle’s marital capacity, and the issues between Froude’s assailants and his defenders, may consult New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, with introduction by Sir James Crichton-Browne; My Relations with Carlyle, by J.A. Froude; The Nemesis of Froude, by Sir J. Crichton-Browne and Alexander Carlyle; and articles in the Contemporary Review (June, July, August, 1903), and Nineteenth Century and After (May, July, 1903). See also Herbert Paul’s Life of Froude (1905). The precise truth in these matters is hardly recoverable, even if it concerns posterity: and though Froude was often inaccurate, he was given full authority by Carlyle, he had all the unpublished material before him, and he was dead and unable to reply to criticism when the later attacks were made.

1 John Aitken Carlyle (1801-1879) finally settled near the Carlyles in Chelsea. He began an English prose version of Dante’s Divine Comedy—which has earned him the name of “Dante Carlyle”—but only completed the translation of the Inferno (1849). The work included a critical edition of the text and a valuable introduction and notes.

CARMAGNOLA, FRANCESCO BUSSONE, Count of (1390-1432), Italian soldier of fortune, was born at Carmagnola near Turin, and began his military career when twelve years old under Facino Cane, a condottiere then in the service of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan. On the death of the latter his duchy was divided among his captains, but his son and heir, Filippo Maria, determined to reconquer it by force of arms. Facino Cane being dead, Visconti applied to Carmagnola, then in his thirtieth year, and gave him command of the army. That general’s success was astonishingly rapid, and soon the whole duchy was brought once more under Visconti’s sway. But Filippo Maria, although he rewarded Carmagnola generously, feared that he might become a danger to himself, and instead of giving him further military commands made him governor of Genoa. Carmagnola felt greatly aggrieved, and failing to obtain a personal interview with the duke, threw up his commission and offered his services to the Venetians (1425). He was well received in Venice, for the republic was beginning to fear the ambitions of the Visconti, and the new doge, Francesco Foscari, was anxious to join the Florentines and go to war with Milan. Carmagnola himself represented the duke’s forces as much less numerous than they were supposed to be, and said that the moment was an opportune one to attack him. These arguments, combined with the doge’s warlike temper, prevailed; Carmagnola was made captain-general of St Mark in 1426, and war was declared. But while the republic was desirous of rapid and conclusive operations, it was to the interest of Carmagnola, as indeed to all other soldiers of fortune, to make the operations last as long as possible, to avoid decisive operations, and to liberate all prisoners quickly. Consequently the campaign dragged on interminably, some battles were won and others lost, truces and peace treaties were made only to be broken, and no definite result was achieved. Carmagnola’s most important success was the battle of Maclodio (1427), but he did not follow it up. The republic, impatient of his dilatoriness, raised his emoluments and promised him immense fiefs including the lordship of Milan, so as to increase his ardour, but in vain. At the same time Carmagnola was perpetually receiving messengers from Visconti, who offered him great rewards if he would abandon the Venetians. The general trifled with his past as with his present employers, believing in his foolish vanity that he held the fate of both in his hand. But the Venetians were dangerous masters to trifle with, and when they at last lost all patience, the Council of Ten determined to bring him to justice. Summoned to Venice to discuss future operations on the 29th of March 1432, he came without suspicion. On his arrival at the ducal palace he was seized, imprisoned and brought to trial for treason against the republic. Although the doge befriended him he was condemned to death and beheaded on the 5th of May. A man of third-rate ability, his great mistake was that he failed to see that he could not do with a solvent and strong government what he could with bankrupt tyrants without military resources, and that the astute Visconti meant to ruin him for his abandonment.

Bibliography.—The best account of Carmagnola is Horatio Brown’s essay in his Studies in Venetian History (London, 1907); see also A. Battistella, Il Conte di Carmagnola (Genoa, 1889); E. Ricotti, Storia delle Compagnie di Ventura (Turin, 1845). Alessandro Manzoni (q.v.) made this episode the subject of a poetical drama, Il Conte di Carmagnola (1826).

(L. V.*)

CARMAGNOLA, a town of Italy, in the province of Turin, 18 m. by rail S. of Turin. Pop. (1901) 2447 (town), 11,721 (commune). It is the junction where the lines for Savona and Cuneo diverge; it is also connected with Turin by a steam tramway via Carignano. Carmagnola is a place of medieval origin. The town was captured by the French in 1796.

CARMAGNOLE (from Carmagnola, the town in Italy), a word first applied to a Piedmontese peasant costume, well known in the south of France, and brought to Paris by the revolutionaries of Marseilles in 1798. It consisted of a short skirted coat with rows of metal buttons, a tricoloured waistcoat and red cap, and became the popular dress of the Jacobins. The name was then given to the famous revolutionary song, composed in 1792, the tune of which, and the wild dance which accompanied it, may have also been brought into France by the Piedmontese. The original first verse began:—

“Monsieur Veto (i.e. Louis XVI.) avait promis D’être fidèle à sa patrie.”

and each verse ends with the refrain:—

“Vive le son, vive le son, Dansons la Carmagnole, Vive le son Du Canon.”

The words were constantly altered and added to during the Terror and later; thus the well-known lines,

“Madame Veto avait promis De faire égorger tout Paris ..... On lui coupa la tête,” &c.,

were added after the execution of Marie Antoinette. Played in double time the tune was a favourite march in the Revolutionary armies, until it was forbidden by Napoleon, on becoming First Consul.

CARMARTHEN (Caerfyrddin), a municipal borough, contributory parliamentary borough (united with Llanelly since 1832), and county town of Carmarthenshire, and a county of itself, finely situated on the right bank of the Towy, which is here tidal and navigable for small craft. Pop. (1901) 10,025. It is the terminal station of a branch of the London & North-Western railway coming southward from Shrewsbury, and is a station on the main line of the Great Western running to Fishguard; it is also the terminus of a branch-line of the Great Western running to Newcastle-Emlyn. The station buildings lie on the left bank of the river, which is here spanned by a fine old stone bridge. There are works for the manufacture of woollens and ropes, also tanneries, but it is as the central market of a large and fertile district that Carmarthen is most important. The weekly Saturday market is well attended, and affords interesting scenes of modern Welsh agricultural life. From the convenient and accessible position of the town, the gaol and lunatic asylum serving for the three south-western counties of Wales—Cardigan, Pembroke and Carmarthen—have been fixed here. Although historically one of the most important towns in South Wales, Carmarthen can boast of very few ancient buildings, and the general aspect of the town is modern. A well-preserved gateway of red sandstone and portions of two towers of the castle are included in the buildings of the present gaol, and the old parish church of St Peter contains some interesting monuments, amongst them being the altar tomb (of the 16th century) of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, K.G., and his wife, which was removed hither for safety at the Reformation from the desecrated church of the neighbouring Priory of St John. Some vestiges of this celebrated monastic house, which formerly owned the famous Welsh MS. known as the “Black Book of Carmarthen,” are visible between the present Priory Street and the river. Of the more recent erections in the town, mention may be made of the granite obelisk in memory of General Sir Thomas Picton (1758-1815) and the bronze statue of General Sir William Nott (1784-1846).

Carmarthen is commonly reputed to occupy the site of the Roman station of Maridunum, and its present name is popularly associated with the wizard-statesman Merlin, or Merddyn, whose memory and prophecies are well remembered in these parts of Wales and whose home is popularly believed to have been the conspicuous hill above Abergwili, known as Merlin’s Hill. Another derivation of the name is to be found in Caer-môr-din, signifying “a fortified place near the sea.” In any case, the antiquity of the town is undisputed, and it served as the seat of government for Ystrad Tywi until the year 877, when Prince Cadell of South Wales abandoned Carmarthen for Dinefawr, near Llandilo, probably on account of the maritime raids of the Danes and Saxons. Towards the close of the 11th century a castle was built here by the Normans, and for the next two hundred years town and castle were frequently taken and retaken by Welsh or English. On the annexation of Wales, Edward I. established here his courts of chancery and exchequer and the great sessions for South Wales. Edward III., by the Statute Staple of 1353, declared Carmarthen the sole staple for Wales, ordering that every bale of Welsh wool should be sealed or “cocketed” here before it left the Principality. The earliest charter recorded was granted in 1201 under King John; a charter of James I. in 1604 constituted Carmarthen a county of itself; and under a charter by George III. in 1764, which had been specially petitioned for by the citizens, the two separate jurisdictions of Old and New Carmarthen were fused and henceforth “called by the name of Our Borough of Carmarthen.” In 1555 Bishop Farrar of St David’s was publicly burned for heresy under Queen Mary at the Market Cross, which was ruthlessly destroyed in 1846 to provide a site for General Nott’s statue. In 1646 General Laugharne took and demolished the castle in the name of the parliament, and in 1649 Oliver Cromwell resided at Carmarthen on his way to Ireland. In 1684 the duke of Beaufort with a numerous train made his state entry into Carmarthen as lord-president of Wales and the Marches. With the rise of Llanelly the industrial importance of Carmarthen has tended to decline; but owing to its central position, its close connexion with the bishops of St David’s and its historic past the town is still the chief focus of all social, political and ecclesiastical movements in the three counties of Cardigan, Pembroke and Carmarthen. Carmarthen was created a parliamentary borough in 1536.

CARMARTHENSHIRE. (Sîr Gaerfyrddin, colloquially known as Sîr Gâr), a county of South Wales bounded N. by Cardigan, E. by Brecon and Glamorgan, W. by Pembroke and S. by Carmarthen Bay of the Bristol Channel. The modern county has an area of 918 sq. m., and is therefore the largest in size of the South Welsh counties. Almost the whole of its surface is hilly and irregular, though the coast-line is fringed with extensive stretches of marsh or sandy burrows. Much of the scenery in the county, particularly in the upper valley of the Towy, is exceedingly beautiful and varied. On its eastern borders adjoining Breconshire rises the imposing range of the Black Mountains (Mynydd Dû), sometimes called the Carmarthenshire Beacons, where the Carmarthen Van attains an elevation of 2632 ft. Mynydd Mallaen in the wild districts of the north-east corner of the county is 1430 ft. in height, but otherwise few of the numberless rounded hills with which Carmarthenshire is thickly studded exceed 1000 ft. The principal river is the Towy (Tywi), which, with its chief tributaries, the Gwili, the Cothi and the Sawdde, drains the central part of the county and enters the Bay at Llanstephan, 9 m. below Carmarthen. Coracles are frequently to be observed on this river, as well as on the Teifi, which separates Carmarthenshire from Cardiganshire on the north. Other streams are the Tâf, which flows through the south-western portion of the county and reaches the sea at Laugharne; the Gwendraeth, with its mouth at Kidwelly; and the Loughor, or Llwchwr, which rises in the Black Mountains and forms for several miles the boundary between the counties of Carmarthen and Glamorgan until it falls into Carmarthen Bay at Loughor. All these rivers contain salmon, sewin (gleisiad) and trout in fair numbers, and are consequently frequented by anglers. With the exception of the Van Pool in the Black Mountains the lakes of the county are inconsiderable in size.

Geology.—The oldest rocks in Carmarthenshire come to the surface in the Vale of Towy at Llanarthney and near Carmarthen; they consist of black shales of Tremadoc (Cambrian) age, and are succeeded by conglomerates, sandstones and shales, with beds of volcanic ash and lava, of Arenig (Ordovician) age, which have been brought up along a belt of intense folding and faulting which follows the Towy from Llangadock to Carmarthen and extends westwards to the edge of the county at Whitland. The Llandeilo shales, flags and limestones and occasional volcanic ashes, which follow, are well developed at Llangadock and Llandeilo and near Carmarthen, and are famed for their trilobites, Asaphus tyrannus and Ogygia Buchi. Shales and mudstones and impersistent limestones of Bala age come next in order, and, bounding the Vale of Towy on the north, extend as a narrow belt north-westwards towards the Presley hills. Except for the foregoing deposits the great area between the Teifi and the Towy, of which little is known, is made up of a monotonous succession of greatly folded slates and shales with interbedded conglomerates and sandstones which give rise to scarps, ridges and moorlands; they appear to be of Llandovery age.

South of the Towy a narrow belt of steeply dipping and even inverted Silurian sandstones and mudstones (Upper Llandovery, Wenlock and Ludlow) extends south-westwards from Llandovery to Llanarthney, where they disappear under the Old Red Sandstone. This formation, which consists of red marls and sandstones with occasional thin impure limestones (cornstones), extends from near Llandovery to beyond Carmarthen Bay; its upper conglomeratic beds cap the escarpment of the Black Mountains (2460 ft.) on the south-eastern borders of the county. To the south the scarps and moorlands of the Carboniferous Limestone and Millstone Grit form the north-western rim of the South Wales coalfield. The rest of the county is occupied by the rich Coal-Measures of the Gwendraeth Valley and Llanelly districts. All the rocks in the county are affected by powerful folds and faults. Glacial deposits are plentiful in the valleys south of the Towy, striae abound on the Millstone Grit and show that the ice-sheet rose far up the slopes of the Black Mountains. Coal is the chief mineral, the iron-ore is no longer worked; the Carboniferous Limestone is burnt at Llandybie; fire-bricks are manufactured from the Millstone Grit, and a few lead-veins are found in the Ordovician rocks.

Industries.—The climate is mild, except in the upland regions, but the annual rainfall is very heavy. With the exception of its south-eastern portion, which forms part of the great South Welsh coalfield, Carmarthenshire may be considered wholly as an agricultural county. The attention of the farmers is devoted to stock-raising and dairy-farming rather than to the growth of cereals, whilst the large tracts of unenclosed hill-country form good pastures for sheep and ponies. The soil varies much, but in the lower valleys of the Towy and Tâf it is exceedingly fertile. Outside agriculture the gathering of cockles at the estuaries of the Towy and Tâf gives employment to a large number of persons, principally women; Ferryside and Laugharne being the chief centres of the cockling industry. The local textile factories at Pencader, Penboyr, Llangeler, and in the valley of the Loughor are of some importance. Gold has been found near Caio in the Cothi valley, but the yield is trifling. There are lead-mines in various places, but none of great value. The really important industries are restricted to the populous south-eastern district, where coal-mining, iron-founding and the smelting of tin and copper are carried on extensively at Llanelly, Pembrey, Tirydail, Garnant, Pontardulais, Ammanford and other centres.

Communications.—The Great Western railway traverses the lower part of the county, whilst a branch of the London & North-Western enters it at its extreme north-eastern point by a tunnel under the Sugar Loaf Mountain, and has its terminal station at Carmarthen. A branch line of the Great Western connects Llanelly with Llandilo by way of Ammanford, and another branch of the same railway runs northward from Carmarthen to Newcastle-Emlyn on the Teifi, joining the Aberystwyth branch, formerly the Manchester & Milford line, at Pencader.

Population and Administration.—The area of the county is 587,816 acres, and the population in 1891 was 130,566 and in 1901 it was 135,325. The municipal boroughs are Carmarthen (pop. 9935), Kidwelly (2285) and Llandovery (1809). Urban districts are Ammanford, Llanelly, Burry Port, Llandilo and Newcastle-Emlyn. The principal towns are Carmarthen, Llanelly (25,617), Llandilo or Llandeilo Fawr (1934), Llangadock (1578), Llandovery, Kidwelly, Pembrey (7513) and Laugharne (1439). The county is in the South Wales circuit, and assizes are held at Carmarthen. The borough of Carmarthen has a commission of the peace and separate quarter sessions. The county is divided into two parliamentary divisions, the eastern and western, and it also includes the united boroughs of Carmarthen and Llanelly, thus returning three members in all to parliament. The ancient county, which contains 75 parishes and part of another, is wholly in the diocese of St David’s.

History.—Carmarthenshire originally formed part of the lands of the Dimetae conquered by the Romans, who constructed military roads and built on the Via Julia the important station of Maridunum upon or near the site of the present county town. After the retirement of the Roman forces this fortified town became known in course of time as Caerfyrddin, anglicized into Carmarthen, which subsequently gave its name to the county. During the 5th and 6th centuries Carmarthenshire, or Ystrad Tywi, was the scene of the labours of many Celtic missionaries, notably of St David and St Teilo, who brought the arts of civilization as well as the doctrines of Christianity to its rude inhabitants. In the 9th century the whole of Ystrad Tywi was annexed to the kingdom of Roderick the Great (Rhodri Mawr), who at his death in 877 bequeathed the principality of South Wales to his son, Cadell. The royal residence of the South Welsh princes was now fixed at Dynevor (Dinefawr) on the Towy near Llandilo. Cadell’s son, Howell the Good (Hywel Dda), was the first to codify the ancient laws of Wales at his palace of Ty Gwyn Ar Dâf, the White Lodge on the banks of the Tâf, near the modern Whitland. In 1080, during the troubled reign of Rhys ap Tudor, the Normans first appeared on the shores of Carmarthen Bay, and before the end of King Henry I.’s reign had constructed the great castles of Kidwelly, Carmarthen, Laugharne and Llanstephan near the coast. From this period until the death of Prince Llewelyn (1282) the history of Carmarthenshire is national rather than local. By the Statutes of Rhuddlan (1284) Edward I. formed the counties of Cardigan and Carmarthen out of the districts of Ceredigion and Ystrad Tywi, the ancient possessions of the house of Dinefawr, which were now formally annexed to the English crown. Nearly a third of the present county, however, still remained under the jurisdiction of the Lords Marchers, and it was not until the Act 27 Henry VIII. that these districts, including the commots of Kidwelly, Iscennen and Carnwillion, were added to Edward I.’s original shire. The prosperity of the new county increased considerably under Edward III., who named Carmarthen the chief staple-town in Wales for the wool trade. The revolt of Owen Glendower had the effect of disturbing the peace of the county for a time, and the French army, landed at Milford on his behalf, was warmly received by the people of Carmarthenshire. In the summer of 1485 Sir Rhys ap Thomas, of Abermarlais and Dinefawr, marched through the county collecting recruits for Henry of Richmond, for which service he was created a knight of the Garter and made governor of all Wales. At the Reformation the removal of the episcopal residence from distant St David’s to Abergwili, a village barely two miles from Carmarthen, brought the county into close touch with the chief Welsh diocese, and the new palace at Abergwili will always be associated with the first Welsh translations of the New Testament and the Prayer Book, made by Bishop Richard Davies (1500-1581) and his friend William Salesbury, of Llanrwst (16th century). In the early part of the 17th century the county witnessed the first religious revival recorded in Welsh annals, that led by Rhys Prichard (d. 1644), the Puritan vicar of Llandovery, whose poetical works, the Canwyll y Cymry (“the Welshman’s Candle”) are still studied in the principality. At the time of the Civil Wars, Richard Vaughan, earl of Carbery, the patron of Jeremy Taylor, was in command of the royal fortresses and troops, but made a very feeble and half-hearted resistance against the parliamentarian forces. During the following century the great Welsh spiritual and educational movement, which later spread over all Wales, had its origin in the quiet and remote parish of Llanddowror, near Laugharne, where the vicar, the celebrated and pious Griffith Jones (1684-1761), had become the founder of the Welsh circulating charity schools. Other prominent members of this important Methodist revival, likewise natives of Carmarthenshire, were William Williams of Pantycelyn, the well-known hymn-writer (1716-1791), and Peter Williams, the Welsh Bible commentator (1722-1796). The county was deeply implicated in the Rebecca Riots of 1842-1843.

Foremost amongst the county families of Carmarthenshire is Rhys, or Rice, of Dynevor Castle, near Llandilo, a modern castellated house standing in a beautiful park which contains the historic ruin of the old Dinefawr fortress. The present Lord Dynevor, the direct lineal descendant of the princes of South Wales, is the head of this family. Almost opposite Dynevor Castle (formerly known as Newtown), on the left bank of the Towy, stands Golden Grove (Gelli Aur), once the seat of the Vaughans, earls of Carbery, whose senior line and titles became extinct early in the 18th century. The famous old mansion has been replaced by a modern Gothic structure, and is now the property of Earl Cawdor. Golden Grove contains the “Hirlas Horn,” the gift of King Henry VII. to Dafydd ap Evan of Llwyndafydd, Cardiganshire, perhaps the most celebrated of Welsh historical relics. Other families of importance, extinct or existing, are Johnes, formerly of Abermarlais and now of Dolaucothi; Williams (now Drummond) of Edwinsford; Lloyd of Forest; Lloyd of Glansevin; Stepney of Llanelly and Gwynne of Taliaris.

Antiquities.—Carmarthenshire contains few memorials of the Roman occupation, but it possesses various camps and tumuli of the British period, and also a small but perfect cromlech near Llanglydwen on the banks of the Tâf. Of its many medieval castles the most important still in existence are: Kidwelly; Laugharne; Llanstephan, a fine pile of the 12th century on a hill at the mouth of the Towy; Carreg Cennen, an imposing Norman fortress crowning a cliff not far from Llandilo; and Dynevor Castle, the ancient seat of Welsh royalty, situated on a bold wooded height above the Towy. The remains of the castles at Carmarthen, Drysllwyn, Llandovery and Newcastle-Emlyn are inconsiderable. Of the monastic houses Talley Abbey (Tal-y-Llychau, a name drawn from the two small lakes in the neighbourhood of its site) was founded by Rhys ap Griffith, prince of South Wales, towards the close of the 12th century for Benedictine monks; Whitland, or Albalanda, also a Benedictine house, was probably founded by Bishop Bernard of St David’s early in the 12th century, on a site long associated with Welsh monastic life; and the celebrated Augustinian Priory of St John at Carmarthen was likewise established in the 12th century. Very slight traces of these three important religious houses now exist. The parish churches of Carmarthenshire are for the most part small and of no special architectural value. Of the more noteworthy mention may be made of St Peter’s at Carmarthen, and of the parish churches at Laugharne, Kidwelly, Llangadock, Abergwili and Llangathen, the last named of which contains a fine monument to Bishop Anthony Rudd (d. 1615). Many of these churches are distinguished by tall massive western towers, usually of the 12th or 13th centuries. Besides Golden Grove and Dynevor the county contains some fine historic houses, prominent amongst which are Abergwili Palace, the official residence of the bishops of St David’s since the Reformation, burnt down in 1902, but rebuilt on the old lines; Aberglasney, a mansion near Llangathen, erected by Bishop Rudd and once inhabited by the poet John Dyer (1700-1758); Court Henry, an ancient seat of the Herbert family; and Abermarlais, once the property of Sir Rhys ap Thomas.

Customs, &c.—The old Welsh costume, folklore and customs have survived longer in Carmarthenshire than perhaps in any other county of Wales. The steeple-crowned beaver hat, now practically extinct, was often to be seen in the neighbourhood of Carmarthen as late as 1890, and the older women often affect the pais-a-gŵn bâch, the frilled mob-cap and the small plaid shawl of a previous generation. Curious instances of old Welsh superstitions are to be found amongst the peasantry of the more remote districts, particularly in the lovely country in the valleys of the Towy and Teifi, where belief in fairies, fairy-rings, goblins and “corpse-candles” still lingers. The curious mumming, known as “Mari Lwyd” (Blessed Mary), in which one of the performers wears a horse’s skull decked with coloured ribbands, was prevalent round Carmarthen as late as 1885. At many parish churches the ancient service of the “Pylgain” (a name said to be a corruption of the Latin pulli cantus) is held at daybreak or cock-crow on Christmas morning. A species of general catechism, known as pwnc, is also common in the churches and Nonconformist chapels. The old custom of receiving New Year’s gifts of bread and cheese, or meal and money (calenig), still flourishes in the rural parishes. The “bidding” before marriage (as in Cardiganshire) was formerly universal and is not yet altogether discontinued, and bidding papers were printed at Llandilo as late as 1900. The horse weddings (priodas ceffylau) were indulged in by the farmer class in the neighbourhood of Abergwili as late as 1880.

Authorities.—T. Nicholas, Annals and Antiquities of the Counties of Wales (London, 1872); W. Spurrell, Carmarthen and its Neighbourhood (Carmarthen, 1879); J.B.D. Tyssen and Alcwyn C. Evans, Royal Charters, &c., relating to the Town and County of Carmarthen (Carmarthen, 1878).

CARMATHIANS (Qarmathians, Karmathians), a Mahommedan sect named after Hamdān Qarmat, who accepted the teaching of the Isma‘īlites (see Mahommedan Religion: Sects) from Ḥosain ul-Ahwāzī, a missionary of Ahmed, son of the Persian Abdallah ibn Maimūn, toward the close of the 9th century. This was in the Sawād of Irak, which was inhabited by a people little attached to Islam. The object of Abdallah ibn Maimūn had been to undermine Islam and the Arabian power by a secret society with various degrees, which offered inducements to all classes and creeds and led men on from an interpretation of Islam to a total rejection of its teaching and a strict personal submission to the head of the society. For the political history of the Carmathians, their conquests and their decay, see Arabia: History; Caliphate (sect. C. §§ 16, 17, 18, 23); and Egypt: History (Mahommedan period).

In their religious teaching they claimed to be Shi‘ites; i.e. they asserted that the imamate belonged by right to the descendants of Ali. Further, they were of the Isma‘īlite branch of these, i.e. they acknowledged the claim to the imamate of Isma’īl the eldest son of the sixth imam. The claim of Isma’īl had been passed over by his father and many Shi‘ites because he had been guilty of drinking wine. The Isma‘īlites said that as the imam could do no wrong, his action only showed that wine-drinking was not sinful. Abdallah taught that from the creation of man there had always been an imam sometimes known, sometimes hidden. Isma‘īl was the last known; a new one was to be looked for. But while the imam was hidden, his doctrines were to be taught by his missionaries (dā‘īs). Hamdān Qarmat was one of these, Ahmed ibn Abdallah being nominally the chief. The adherents of this party were initiated by degrees into the secrets of its doctrines and were divided into seven (afterwards nine) classes. In the first stage the convert was taught the existence of mystery in the Koran and made to feel the necessity of a teacher who could explain it. He took an oath of complete submission and paid a sum of money. In the second stage the earlier teachers of Islam were shown to be wrong in doctrine and the imams alone were proved to be infallible. In the third it was taught that there were only seven imams and that the other sects of the Shi’ites were in error. In the fourth the disciple learnt that each of the seven imams had a prophet, who was to be obeyed in all things. The prophet of the last imam was Abdallah. The doctrine of Islam was that Mahomet was the last of the prophets. In the fifth stage the uselessness of tradition and the temporary nature of the precepts and practices of Mahomet were taught, while in the sixth the believer was induced to give up these practices (prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, &c.). At this point the Carmathian had completely ceased to be a Moslem. In the remaining degrees there was more liberty of opinion allowed and much variety of belief and teaching existed.

The last contemporary mention of the Carmathians is that of Nāsir ibn Khosrau, who visited them in a.d. 1050. In Arabia they ceased to exercise influence. In Persia and Syria their work was taken up by the Assassins (q.v.). Their doctrines are said, however, to exist still in parts of Syria, Persia, Arabia and India, and to be still propagated in Zanzibar.

See Journal asiatique (1877), vol. i. pp. 377-386.

(G. W. T.)

CARMAUX, a town of southern France, in the department of Tarn, on the left bank of the Cérou, 10 m. N. of Albi by rail. Pop. (1906) 8618. The town gives its name to an important coal-basin, and carries on the manufacture of glass.

CARMEL, the mountain promontory by which the seacoast of Palestine is interrupted south of the Bay of Acre, 32° 50′ N., 35° E. It continues as a ridge of oolitic limestone, broken by ravines and honeycombed by caves, running for about 20 m. in a south-easterly direction, and finally joining the mountains of Samaria. Its maximum height is at ‘Esfia, 1760 ft. It was included in the territory of the tribe of Asher. No great political event is recorded in connexion with it; it appears throughout the Old Testament “either as a symbol or as a sanctuary”; its name means “garden-land.” Its fruitfulness is referred to by Isaiah and by Amos; Micah describes it as wooded, to which was no doubt due its value as a hiding-place (Amos ix. 3). It is now wild, only a few patches being cultivated; most of the mountain is covered with a thick brushwood of evergreens, oaks, myrtles, pines, &c., which is gradually being cleared away. That the cultivation was once much more extensive is indicated by the large number of rock-hewn wine and olive presses. Vines and olives are now found at ‘Esfia only. The outstanding position of Carmel, its solitariness, its visibility over a wide area of country, and its fertility, marked it out as a suitable place for a sanctuary from very ancient times. It is possibly referred to in the Palestine lists of Thothmes III. as Rosh Kodsu, “the holy headland.” An altar of Jehovah existed here from early times; it was destroyed when the Phoenician Baal claimed the country under Jezebel, and repaired by Elijah (1 Kings xviii. 30) before the great sacrifice which decided the claims of the contending deities. The traditional site of this sacrifice is at El-Muhraka, at the eastern end of the ridge. The Druses still visit this site, where is a dilapidated structure of stones, as a holy place for sacrifice. On the bank of the Kishon below is a mound known as Tell el-Ḳusīs, “the Priest’s mound,” but the connexion that has been sought between this name and the slaughter of the priests of Baal is hardly justifiable. Other sites on the hill are traditionally connected with Elijah, and some melon-like fossils are explained as being fruits refused to him by its owner, who was punished by having them turned to stone. Elisha was stationed here for a time. Tacitus describes the hill as the site of an oracle, which Vespasian consulted. Iamblichus in his life of Pythagoras speaks of it as a place of great sanctity forbidden to the vulgar. A grove of trees, called the “Trees of the Forty” [Martyrs], still remains, no doubt in former times a sacred grove. So early as the 4th century Christian hermits began to settle here, and in 1207 the Carmelite order was organized. The monastery, founded at the fountain of Elijah in 1209, has had many vicissitudes: the monks were slaughtered or driven to Europe in 1238 and the building decayed; it was visited and refounded by St Louis in 1252; again despoiled in 1291; once more rebuilt in 1631, and, in 1635 (when the monks were massacred), sacked and turned into a mosque. Once more the monks established themselves, only to be murdered after Napoleon’s retreat in 1799. The church and the monastery were entirely destroyed in 1821 by ‘Abd Allah, pasha of Acre, on the plea that the monks would favour the revolting Greeks; but it was shortly afterwards rebuilt by order from the Porte, partly at ‘Abd Allah’s expense and partly by contributions raised in Europe, Asia and Africa by Brother Giovanni Battista of Frascati. The villages with which the mountain was once covered have been to a large extent depopulated by the Druses.

(R. A. S. M.)

CARMELITES, in England called White Friars (from the white mantle over a brown habit), one of the four mendicant orders. The stories concerning the origin of this order, seriously put forward and believed in the 17th and 18th centuries, are one of the curiosities of history. It was asserted that Elias established a community of hermits on Mount Carmel, and that this community existed without break until the Christian era and was nothing else than a Jewish Carmelite order, to which belonged the Sons of the Prophets and the Essenes. Members of it were present at St Peter’s first sermon on Pentecost and were converted, and built a chapel on Mount Carmel in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, as well as the apostles, enrolled herself in the order. In 1668 the Bollandist Daniel Papenbroek (1628-1714), in the March volumes of the Acta Sanctorum, rejected these stories as fables. A controversy arose and the Carmelites had recourse to the Inquisition. In Spain they succeeded in getting the offending volumes of the Acta censured, but in Rome they were less successful, and so hot did the controversy become that in 1698 a decree was issued imposing silence upon both parties, until a formal decision should be promulgated—which has not yet been done.

The historical origin of the Carmelites must be placed at the middle of the 12th century, when a crusader from Calabria, named Berthold, and ten companions established themselves as hermits near the cave of Elias on Mount Carmel. A Greek monk, Phocas, who visited the Holy Land in 1185, gives an account of them, and says that the ruins of an ancient building existed on Mount Carmel; but though it is likely enough that there had previously been Christian monks and hermits on the spot, it is impossible to place the beginning of the Carmelite institute before Berthold. About 1210 the hermits on Carmel received from Albert, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, a rule comprising sixteen articles. This was the primitive Carmelite rule. The life prescribed was strictly eremitical: the monks were to live in separate cells or huts, devoted to prayer and work; they met only in the oratory for the liturgical services, and were to live a life of great silence, seclusion, abstinence and austerity. This rule received papal approbation in 1226. Soon, however, the losses of the Christian arms in Palestine made Carmel an unsafe place of residence for western hermits, and so, c. 1240, they migrated first to Cyprus and thence to Sicily, France and England. In England the first establishment was at Alnwick and the second at Aylesford, where the first general chapter of the order was held in 1247, and St Simon Stock, an English anchorite who had joined the order, was elected general. During his generalate the institute was adapted to the conditions of the western lands to which it had been transplanted, and for this purpose the original rule had to be in many ways altered: the austerities were mitigated, and the life was turned from eremitical into cenobitical, but on the mendicant rather than the monastic model. The polity and government were also organized on the same lines, and the Carmelites were turned into mendicants and became one of the four great orders of Mendicant Friars, in England distinguished as the “White Friars” from the white mantle worn over the dark brown habit. This change was made and the new rule approved in 1247, and under this form the Carmelites spread all over western Europe and became exceedingly popular, as an order closely analogous to the Dominicans and Franciscans. In the course of time, further relaxations of the rule were introduced, and during the Great Schism the Carmelites were divided between the two papal obediences, rival generals being elected,—a state of things that caused still further relaxations. To cope with existing evils Eugenius IV. approved in 1431 of a rule notably milder than that of 1247, but many houses clung to the earlier rule; thus arose among the Carmelites the same division into “observants” and “conventuals” that wrought such mischief among the Franciscans. During the 15th and 16th centuries various attempts at reform arose, as among other orders, and resulted in the formation of semi-independent congregations owing a titular obedience to the general of the order. The Carmelite friars seem to have flourished especially in England, where at the dissolution of the monasteries there were some 40 friaries. (See F.A. Gasquet, English Monastic Life, table and maps; Catholic Dictionary, art. “Carmelites.”) There were no Carmelite nunneries in England, and indeed until the middle of the 15th century there were no nuns at all anywhere in the order.

Of all movements in the Carmelite order by far the most important and far-reaching in its results has been the reform initiated by St Teresa. After nearly thirty years passed in a Carmelite convent in Avila under the mitigated rule of 1431, she founded in the same city a small convent wherein a rule stricter than that of 1247 was to be observed. This was in 1562. In spite of opposition and difficulties of all kinds, she succeeded in establishing a number, not only of nunneries, but (with the co-operation of St John of the Cross, q.v.) also of friaries of the strict observance; so that at her death in 1582 there were of the reform 15 monasteries of men and 17 of women, all in Spain. The interesting and dramatic story of the movement should be sought for in the biographies of the two protagonists; as also an account of the school of mystical theology founded by them, without doubt the chief contribution made by the Carmelites to religion (see Mysticism). Here it must suffice to say that the idea of the reform was to go behind the settlement of 1247 and to restore and emphasize the purely contemplative character of primitive Carmelite life: indeed provision was made for the reproduction, for such as desired it, of the eremitical life led by Berthold and his companions. St Teresa’s additions to the rule of 1247 made the life one of extreme bodily austerity and of prolonged prayer for all, two hours of private prayer daily, in addition to the choral canonical office, being enjoined. From the fact that those of the reform wore sandals in place of shoes and stockings, they have come to be called the Discalced, or bare-footed, Carmelites, also Teresians, in distinction to the Calced or older branch of the order. In 1580 the reformed monasteries were made a separate province under the general of the order, and in 1593 this province was made by papal act an independent order with its own general and government, so that there are now two distinct orders of Carmelites. The Discalced Carmelites spread rapidly all over Catholic Europe, and then to Spanish America and the East, especially India and Persia, in which lands they have carried on to this day extensive missionary undertakings. Both observances suffered severely from the various revolutions, but they both still exist, the Discalced being by far the most numerous and thriving. There are in all some 2000 Carmelite friars, and the nuns are much more numerous. In England and Ireland there are houses, both of men and of women, belonging to each observance.