(3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also
the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in
detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could
arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as
to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great
Victorian masters of argumentative prose.

THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881

[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE. _From the painting by James McNeil
Whistler, Glasgow Art Galleries_.]

Life.--Thomas Carlyle, who became one of the great tonic forces of
the nineteenth century, was also most interested in spiritual growth.
He specially emphasized the gospel of work as the only agency that
could develop the atmosphere necessary for such growth, and, though
deeply religious, he cared little for any special faith or creed.

The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at
Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready
for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles
between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could
not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught
while he was considering what vocation to follow.

In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended
on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William
Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to
places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was
forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly
learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning
her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and they were married
in 1826. In 1828 they went to live for six lonely years on her farm at
Craigenputtock, sixteen miles north of Dumfries, where it was so quiet
that Mrs. Carlyle said she could hear the sheep nibbling the grass a
quarter of a mile away. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited them here and
formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. It was here that Carlyle
fought the intense spiritual battle of his early life, here that he
wrote his first great work, _Sartor Resartus_, which his wife
pronounced "a work of genius, dear."

[Illustration: CRAIGENPUTTOCK.]

It would be difficult to overestimate the beneficent influence which
Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty
and spiritual stress. When her private correspond