INTRODUCTION THOMAS CARLYLE THOMAS CARLYLE was born December 4, 1795; more than eighty-five years later he died, February 4, 1881. The space of years covered by his life marks, more than that of almost any of his contemporaries, the great literary production of the nineteenth century. At the time of his birth, of the greater literary men of the eighteenth century, only Burns, Burke, Cowper, and Sheridan were living, and of these only the last survived into the next century. Three years after Carlyle's birth, the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge may be said, so far as the remark can be made of any one book, to have ushered in the new literary era; both of these men Carlyle outlived by many years. The great poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, achieved fame and died while Carlyle was yet a young man, and the Waverley Novels began to appear only when he was nineteen. De Quincey, Lamb, and Landor produced nothing of moment before the beginning of the century, and the last and longestlived of these Carlyle survived by seventeen years. The lives of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill are comprehended within the span of his life. By the time of his death, too, he had seen the flower of the great names who outlived him; by 1881, the best poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold had been written; in prose, Newman, Arnold and Ruskin, Freeman, Froude and Lecky, Darwin and Spencer, had done the work on which their fame will rest. Of American authors of the same period, Irving and Cooper were writing while Carlyle was struggling in Edinburgh and Craigenputtock; Prescott, Poe, and Hawthorne are compassed in the period of his life, and Emerson and Longfellow died only one year later than he. The story of his own life is the tale of years of struggle, of growing and final recognition as a man of letters with an influence second to that of none of his contemporaries. The place of Carlyle's birth was Ecclefechan, near Annandale in Dumfriesshire, the county of Scotland where Burns had passed his last years. Carlyle's parents, like those of the poet, though descended through a long ancestry, were poor. James Carlyle, the father, was by occupation a mason, at which he sometimes made a hundred pounds a year; in character he was not unlike William Burness. The mother was Margaret Aitken, and Thomas Carlyle was the eldest of nine children. Like the parents of Burns, the elder Carlyles were people of integrity and piety; they watched over their children with exceeding devotion, and gave them all the education in their power. Carlyle, who early displayed his uncommon ability, was sent to the schools in the neighborhood, and by the age of thirteen was ready to enter Edinburgh University. He was intended by his parents for the ministry in the Scotch Church, but while at Edinburgh was apparently so assailed with religious doubts as to make the step impossible. During a few years after leaving the University, he taught school, first at Annan Academy as tutor in mathematics, and later at Kirkcaldy, where he made the acquaintance of Edward Irving, one of his warmest friends; Irving's library enabled Carlyle to gratify his love of reading and to mitigate the weariness which he felt at teaching. In October, 1818, however, teaching had become so distasteful to him that he resigned from his school, and went to Edinburgh to try to earn his living. The years at Edinburgh mark perhaps the lowest state in the life of Carlyle. He was tormented with dyspepsia and |