ted couple known to modern
literature.

It is not necessary to bring to light, and in regular order, the
external history of Thomas Carlyle, or of Jane Baillie Welsh, who
married him. There is an extraordinary amount of rather fanciful gossip
about this marriage, and about the three persons who had to do with it.

Take first the principal figure, Thomas Carlyle. His life until that
time had been a good deal more than the life of an ordinary
country-man. Many persons represent him as a peasant; but he was
descended from the ancient lords of a Scottish manor. There was
something in his eye, and in the dominance of his nature, that made his
lordly nature felt. Mr. Froude notes that Carlyle's hand was very small
and unusually well shaped. Nor had his earliest appearance as a young
man been commonplace, in spite of the fact that his parents were
illiterate, so that his mother learned to read only after her sons had
gone away to Edinburgh, in order that she might be able to enjoy their
letters.

At that time in Scotland, as in Puritan New England, in each family the
son who had the most notable "pairts" was sent to the university that
he might become a clergyman. If there were a second son, he became an
advocate or a doctor of medicine, while the sons of less distinction
seldom went beyond the parish school, but settled down as farmers,
horse-dealers, or whatever might happen to come their way.

In the case of Thomas Carlyle, nature marked him out for something
brilliant, whatever that might be. His quick sensibility, the way in
which he acquired every sort of learning, his command of logic, and,
withal, his swift, unerring gift of language, made it certain from the
very first that he must be sent to the university as soon as he had
finished school, and could afford to go.

At Edinburgh, where he matriculated in his fourteenth year, he
astonished every one by the enormous extent of his reading, and by the
firm hold he kept upon it. One hesitates to credit these so-called
reminiscences which tell how he absorbed mountains of Greek and immense
quantities of political economy and history and sociology and various
forms of metaphysics, as every Scotsman is bound to do. That he read
all night is a common story told of many a Scottish lad at college. We
may believe, however, that Carlyle studied and read as most of his
fellow students did, but far beyond them, in extent.

When he had completed about half of his divinity cour