IN carlyle's country 71 



name had disappeared, and the ground was used a 

 second time. The ordinary graves in these old 

 burying places appear to become " extinct " in about 

 two hundred years. It was very rare to find a date 

 older than that. He said the " Cairls " were a pe- 

 culiar set ; there was nobody like them. You would 

 know them, man and woman, as soon as they 

 opened their mouths to speak; they spoke as if 

 against a stone wall. (Their words hit hard. ) This 

 is somewhat like Carlyle's own view of his style. 

 "My style," he says in his note-book, when he was 

 thirty-eight years of age, "is like no other man's. 

 The first sentence bewrays me." Indeed, Carlyle's 

 style, which has been so criticised, was as much a 

 part of himself, and as little an affectation, as his 

 shock of coarse yeoman hair and bristly beard and 

 bleared eyes were a part of himself; he inherited 

 them. What Taine calls his barbarisms was his 

 strong mason sire cropping out. He was his father's 

 son to the last drop of his blood, a master builder 

 working with might and main. No more did the 

 former love to put a rock face upon his wall than 

 did the latter to put the same rock face upon his 

 sentences; and he could do it, too, as no other 

 writer, ancient or modern, could. 



I occasionally saw strangers at the station, which 

 is a mile from the village, inquiring their way to 

 the churchyard; but I was told there had been a 

 notable falling off of the pilgrims and visitors of 

 late. During the first few months after his burial, 

 they nearly denuded the grave of its turf; but after 



