Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/213

 THOMAS CARLYLE 157 thur, came to Edinburgh in the spring, to be under his care while attending classes at the university. Carlyle found his duties pleasant, and was now able to give substantial pecuniary aid to his family, particularly as regarded the educa- tion of his younger brother John, who subsequently became a physician, but is better known as the translator of Dante's " Inferno " (1849). Carlyle, after con- templating a history of the British commonwealth, and a novel in association with Miss Welsh, arranged to write a "Life of Schiller" for Mr. Taylor, the proprietor of the London Magazine, and a translation of the "Wilhelm Meister" of Goethe for Mr. Boyd, an Edinburgh publisher. These two enterprises fully occupied his leisure while he was engaged as a tutor to the Bullers, whose par- ents, after spending the winter of 1822 in Edinburgh, removed in the following spring to Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, on the Tay. Carlyle paid his first visit to London in June, 1824, whither the Bullers had gone, and although his engagement with them was abruptly broken off, he re- mained there till March, 1825, superintending the publication in book form of his " Life of Schiller." At this time he received the first of a series of letters from Goethe and made the acquaintance of Coleridge, Thomas Campbell, Allan Cunningham, Proctor, and other literary notabilities. On March 26, 1825, he removed to the farm of Hoddam Hill, about two miles from Mainhill, which he had leased ; his brother Alexander doing the practical work of farming, while he himself translated German romances. Miss Welsh now consented to become his wife, after a lengthened correspondence. In 1826 he quarrelled with his land- lord, his father gave up his farm, and both removed to Scotsbrig, another farm in the vicinity of Ecclesfechan. The marriage between Carlyle and Miss Welsh took place on October 17, 1826, at her grandfather's house at Templand, Dum- friesshire, and they at once settled in 2 1 Comely Bank, Edinburgh. Here Car- lyle completed four volumes of translations from Tieck, Musaeus, and Richter, which were published under the title of "German Romance," and commenced a didactic novel, but burned his manuscript. An introduction from Proctor to Jef- frey led to his becoming a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, his first article, on Jean Paul Richter, appearing in June, 1827. The same year he failed in. his candidature for the chair of moral philosophy in the University of St. Andrews, in succession to Dr. Chalmers. Various subsequent attempts to obtain an aca- demic position for Carlyle met with no better success. In May, 1828, the Carlyles removed to Mrs. Carlyle's little property of Craig- enputtock, which, in a letter to Goethe, he described as "the loneliest nook in Britain, six miles removed from anyone likely to visit me," and there they lived for about six years. Carlyle subsisted during this period by writing for a number of reviews, including the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the Foreign Quarterly, and Eraser s Magazine. The chief of the essays which he produced at Craigen- puttock are those on Burns, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, and Schiller. He also wrote a " History of German Literature," the best parts of which were subsequently published in the form of essays; and in 1833-34 there appeared, by instalments in Erasers Magazine, " Sartor Resartus," his most char-