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church-yard held ; that of the elder Peel being among 

 them. He spoke of many of the oldest graves as 

 " extinct ; " nobody owned or claimed them ; the 

 name had disappeared, arid the ground was used a 

 second time. The ordinary graves in these old bury- 

 ing 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 peculiar 

 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 sen- 

 tence 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 crop- 

 ping 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 mo'dern, could. 



I occasionally saw strangers at the station, which 

 is a mile from the village, inquiring their way to the 

 church-yard ; but I was told there had been a notable 



