Himself the son of a clergyman, Alexander Carlyle had a good school-drilling in Prestonpans, where he was born.  One of the stories of his childhood is very amusing, inasmuch as it pictures a dozen old women listening to young Alexander, aged six, who reads the Song of Solomon to them in a graveyard, he all the while perched on a tombstone.  My Lord Grange was the principal man in Prestonpans parish; and Master Carlyle, with his excellent father, had great reverence for the patron who had been the cause of the family’s transplantation from Annandale.  My Lady was a very lively person, daughter of the man who shot President Lockhart in the dark because he had infuriated him in an arbitration case in the court.  This great family attracted the boyish wonder of young Carlyle, and some of the gossiping stories that he heard in his father’s house made his juvenile ears tingle.  Poor Lady Grange!  Quarrelling with her husband one day, on his return from London, where pretty Fanny Lindsay, who kept a coffee-house in the Haymarket, had bewitched him, she never knew peace again.  Her temper, never very soothing or placable, got entire possession of her life, and she rained stormy gusts of passion on her guilty lord.  He trembled and endured, till he found a razor concealed under his wife’s pillow, and then he determined to remove his violent helpmeet to a safe seclusion.  By main force, with the aid of accomplices, he seized the lady in his house in Edinburgh, and bore her through Stirling to the Highlands.  Thence she was taken to St. Kilda’s desolate island, far off in the Western Ocean, and there kept for the remainder of her days, scantily furnished with only the coarsest fare.  Her condition was most wretched to the last.  In those days, licentiousness and religious enthusiasm were not incompatible associates, and Lord Grange frequently spent his evenings with the Minister of Prestonpans, praying, and settling high points of Calvinism with the old pastor.  Good Mrs. Carlyle used to complain that they did not part without wine, and that late hours were consequent upon the claret they liberally imbibed after their pious discussions.

Dr. Doddridge’s famous Colonel Gardiner came to reside in Minister Carlyle’s parish, and told the story of his remarkable conversion, with his own lips, to the clergyman.  The hook which turned him from his wicked career was Gurnall’s “Christian Armor,” a volume placed many years before, by a mother’s hand, in his trunk, and until then neglected.  Young Carlyle hoard Gardiner tell the story of his change of life several times to different sets of people, and he thought Doddridge had marred the tale by introducing the incident of a blaze of light, which the Colonel himself never spoke of having seen, when he related his conversion.

When Alexander was eleven years old, he took a little journey with his father and another clergyman by the name of Jardine; and the two pious, elderly gentlemen, having a great turn for fun and buffoonery, made sport wherever they went.  Turning their wigs hind-part foremost, and making faces, they delighted in diverting the children they encountered on the way.