delight at entertaining us forgets that the first
quality of a critical or historical work is to be accurate, and the second
to be interesting.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)

In marked contrast with Macaulay, the brilliant and cheerful essayist, is
Thomas Carlyle, the prophet and censor of the nineteenth century. Macaulay
is the practical man of affairs, helping and rejoicing in the progress of
his beloved England. Carlyle lives apart from all practical interests,
looks with distrust on the progress of his age, and tells men that truth,
justice, and immortality are the only worthy objects of human endeavor.
Macaulay is delighted with material comforts; he is most at home in
brilliant and fashionable company; and he writes, even when ill and
suffering, with unfailing hopefulness and good nature. Carlyle is like a
Hebrew prophet just in from the desert, and the burden of his message is,
"Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!" Both men are, in different ways,
typical of the century, and somewhere between the two extremes--the
practical, helpful activity of Macaulay and the spiritual agony and
conflict of Carlyle--we shall find the measure of an age which has left the
deepest impress upon our own.

LIFE OF CARLYLE. Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, in 1795, a
few months before Burns's death, and before Scott had published his first
work. Like Burns, he came of peasant stock,--strong, simple, God-fearing
folk, whose influence in Carlyle's later life is beyond calculation. Of his
mother he says, "She was too mild and peaceful for the planet she lived
in"; and of his father, a stone mason, he writes, "Could I write my books
as he built his houses, walk my way so manfully through this shadow world,
and leave it with so little blame, it were more than all my hopes."

Of Carlyle's early school life we have some interesting glimpses in _Sartor
Resartus_. At nine years he entered the Annan grammar school, where he was
bullied by the older boys, who nicknamed him Tom the Tearful. For the
teachers of those days he has only ridicule, calling them "hide-bound
pedants," and he calls the school by the suggestive German name of
_Hinterschlag Gymnasium_. At the wish of his parents, who intended Carlyle
for the ministry, he endured this hateful school life till 1809, when he
entered Edinburgh University. There he spent five miserable years, of which
his own record is: "I was without friends, experience, or connection in the