Roddan, who died 31 Jan. 1804, in her sixty-first year. His 'Autobiography' gives a most agreeable impression of him as a genial, cultivated, liberal-minded, and sagacious minister of the kirk, who united to the breadth of the man of the world a sincere devotion to what he considered to be the true interests of his order, and it is unrivalled as a picture of the Edinburgh and Scotch society of his time. Although its merit had long been appreciated in manuscript, it was not published until 1860, excellently edited, with notes and a supplementary chapter, by John Hill Burton. Its full title is 'Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Mmister of Inveresk, containing Memorials of the Men and Events of his Time.'
Sir Walter Scott said (Lockhart, Life, p. 368): 'The grandest demi-god I ever saw was Dr. Carlyle … commonly called "Jupiter Carlyle" … and a shrewd old carle was he no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor.' Carlyle's portrait prefixed to the 'Autobiography' somewhat resembles those of Goethe, and he retains a certain dignity even in the caricatures of him, of which there are several in Kay's 'Edinburgh Portraits.' He was more poetical than Sir Walter Scott supposed. Wnether he was the author or not of the 'songs' and 'gay catches' which in an early letter to him Smollett seems to speak of as his (Supplementary chapter to Autobiography, p. 564), he certainly wrote the spirited and musical 'Verses on his Grace the Duke of Buccleuch's birthday' published in the 'Scots Magazine' for 1767. With Henry Mackenzie he filled up some of the lacuna in an imperfect manuscript copy of Collins's 'Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlanders,' which he presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on its establishment, and which, with a letter from Carlyle, was published for the first time in its 'Transactions' (Edinburgh, 1788, i. 63-75). In old age he displayed an interest in Scott's 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' and in the early poetry of Wordsworth.
Carlyle published a few sermons and contributed to Sir John Sinclair's 'Statistical Account of Scotland' (1791-9) an elaborate 'Account of the Parish of Inveresk,' topographical, historical, and statistical, in which he describes his successful introduction into Scotland of ploughing with two horses and without a driver. In the Egerton MSS. in the British Museum (Nos. 2185-6) there are several letters from Carlyle to Dr. Douglas, bishop of Salisbury, urging the claims of clerical protégés and gossiping about Hume, Robertson, and other Edinburgh literati. Carlyle is the subject of one of Kay's caricatures.
[Dr. Carlyle's Autobiography, Pamphlets, and Sermons; A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by the late John Kay, miniature painter, Edinburgh, with Biographical Sketches and Illustrative Anecdotes (new edition), 1877; Hew Scott's Fasti Eccl. Scot. i. 287, 896, 399; authorities cited.]
CARLYLE, JANE WELSH. [See under Carlyle, Thomas, 1795–1881.]
CARLYLE, JOHN AITKEN, M.D. (1801–1879), younger brother of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) [q. v.], was born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, on 7 July 1801. 'A logic chopper from the cradle' is one of the descriptions given of him by his elder brother, whom at an early age he succeeded as a teacher at the Annan academy. Thomas Carlyle, when tutor to the Bullers, devoted a portion of his salary to enable John Carlyle to study medicine at the university of Edinburgh, where he took his degree of M.D. in or about 1825. Two years later the same brother sent him to complete his medical education in Germany, and maintained him for several years in London, where he tried to obtain practice as a physician. Failing in this he attempted literature, and contributed a little to 'Fraser's Magazine' and other periodicals. He helped his brother in translating Legendre's Geometry. In 1831, on the recommendation of his brother's helpful friend, Francis Jeffrey, he was appointed travelling physician to the Countess of Clare, with a salary of three hundred guineas a year and his expenses. In the following year he remitted money to his mother, and paid off his debt to his brother. Occasionally visiting England and Scotland, he spent some seven years in Italy with Lady Clare, in the intervals of his attendance practising for some time on his own account as a physician in Rome, where, during an outbreak of cholera, he gave his medical services gratuitously among the poor. Returning to England in 1837, he became in 1838 travelling physician to the Duke of Buccleuch, with whom he revisited the continent. By 1843 he had resigned this position, and, possessed of a moderate competency, abandoned almost entirely the practice of his profession, declining an invitation from Lady Holland, given at the suggestion of Lord Jeffrey, to become her physician in attendance. He lived for several years in lodgings near the Chelsea residence of his brigadier, to whom, medically and otherwise, he made himself very useful The first instalment of what he intended to be an English prose translation of the whole of Dante's great poem appeared in 1849 as 'Dante's Divine Comedy, the Inferno, with the text of the original col-
