On Tuesday, January 26th, 1832, Carlyle received tidings of the death of his father. He departed on the Sunday morning previous 'almost without a struggle,' wrote his favourite sister Jane. It was a heavy stroke for Carlyle. 'Natural tears,' he exclaimed shortly afterwards, 'have come to my relief. I can look at my dear Father, and that section of the Past which he has made alive for me, in a certain sacred, sanctified light, and give way to what thoughts rise in me without feeling that they are weak and useless.' Carlyle determined that the time till the funeral was past (Friday) should be spent with his wife only. All others were excluded. He walked 'far and much,' chiefly in the Regent's Park, and considered about many things, his object being to see clearly what his calamity meant--what he lost, and what lesson that loss was to teach him. Carlyle considered his father as one of the most interesting men he had known. 'Were you to ask me,' he said, 'which had the greater natural faculty,' Robert Burns or my father, 'I might, perhaps, actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider Education, my Father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of Musical Utterance; the other wholly a man of Action, even with Speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from Nature and the Arena from Fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly _know_ it. As a man of Speculation--had Culture ever unfolded him--he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; but he was a man of Conduct, and Work keeps all right. What strange shapeable creatures we are!'[13] Nothing that the elder Carlyle undertook to do but he did it faithfully, and like a true man. 'I shall look,' said his distinguished son, 'on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district. No one that comes after him will ever say, "Here was the finger of a hollow eye-servant." They are little texts for me of the gospel of man's free will. Nor will his deeds and sayings in any case be found unworthy--not false and barren, but genuine and fit. Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I owe him much more than existence; I owe him a noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he _exclusively_ that determined on _educating_ me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am or may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant itself honourably forth into new generations.'[14] One of the wise men about Ecclefechan told James Carlyle: 'Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents.' His father once told Carlyle this, and added: 'Thou hast not done so; God be thanked for it.' When James