=Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)= was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, on the 4th of December 1795. His father was a stonemason, at whose death Carlyle thus tenderly wrote in his Diary:--"I owe him much more than existence. I owe him a noble inspiring example. 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 and 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." From Annan Grammar School the young Carlyle went to Edinburgh University, where he became a voracious reader, although never a great classical scholar. He then took the post of mathematical tutor at Annan school, and afterwards at Kirkcaldy, where he was friendly with Edward Irving, afterwards the famous preacher. Disgusted with this life he flung up his appointment, and determined to study for the law. For some time he eked out a scanty subsistence in Edinburgh by writing biographies for Brewster's _Encyclopædia_. It was at this period that he obtained some measure of mental and moral stimulus from his German studies. Goethe opened a new world to him. He began to study German in 1819, induced thereto by Madame de Staël's interesting account of the German poets and philosophers. Goethe was seventy-five years old when in 1824 he received from Carlyle an English translation of "Wilhelm Meister," with a letter, saying, "Four years ago, when I read your 'Faust' among the mountains of my native Scotland, I could not but fancy I might one day see you, and pour out before you, as before a father, the woes and wanderings of a heart whose mysteries you seemed so thoroughly to comprehend, and could so beautifully represent." Two years later Carlyle sent Goethe his "Life of Schiller," and once again he expressed his intense devotion to one "whose voice came to me from afar, with counsel and help, in my utmost need." "For if," he continues, "I have been delivered from darkness into any measure of light, if I know aught of myself and my destination, it is to the study of your writings more than to any other circumstance that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always thank and reverence with the feeling of a disciple to his Master, nay, of a son to his spiritual Father." In the meantime Carlyle had married Jane Welsh, the daughter of a doctor in Haddington, and had settled at the lonely farm-house of Craigenputtock, in Dumfriesshire. There he was visited by Emerson, and there he remained for six years, before removing to London. Not only had Carlyle then translated "Wilhelm Meister" and written the "Life of Schiller," but he had made numerous translations from Musæus, Tieck, and Richter, and had published essays on these and other German authors. Jean Paul Richter had a peculiar attraction for