and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on L14 a year.

On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am
resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has
decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father.
Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and
his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries
to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects
to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove
in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled
at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family
migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil
months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in
some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social
gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their
brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the
northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster,
John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey,
a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself.
Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch
cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still
struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_.
The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the
course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks
the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical
essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the
front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_
was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign
Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were
ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send.