, Adam Smith,
and Home, the author of "Douglas"; a leader of the Moderate party in the
Church of Scotland; left an "Autobiography," which was not published till
1860, which shows its author to have been a man who took things as he
found them, and enjoyed them to the full as any easy-going, cultured
pagan (1722-1805).
CARLYLE, THOMAS, born in the village of Ecclefechan, Annandale,
Dumfriesshire; son of James Carlyle, a stone-mason, and afterwards a
small farmer, a man of great force, penetration, and integrity of
character, and of Margaret Aitken, a woman of deep piety and warm
affection; educated at the parish school and Annan Academy; entered the
University of Edinburgh at the age of 14, in the Arts classes;
distinguished himself early in mathematics; enrolled as a student in the
theological department; became a teacher first in Annan Academy, then at
Kirkcaldy; formed there an intimate friendship with Edward Irving; threw
up both school-mastering and the church; removed to Edinburgh, and took
to tutoring and working for an encyclopedia, and by-and-by to translating
from the German and writing criticisms for the Reviews, the latter of
which collected afterwards in the "Miscellanies," proved "epoch-making"
in British literature, wrote a "Life of Schiller"; married Jane Welsh, a
descendant of John Knox; removed to Craigenputtock, in Dumfriesshire,
"the loneliest nook in Britain," where his original work began with
"Sartor Resartus," written in 1831, a radically spiritual book, and a
symbolical, though all too exclusively treated as a speculative, and an
autobiographical; removed to London in 1834, where he wrote his "French
Revolution" (1837), a book instinct with the all-consuming fire of the
event which it pictures, and revealing "a new moral force" in the
literary life of the country and century; delivered three courses of
lectures to the _elite_ of London Society (1837-1840), the last of them
"Heroes and Hero-Worship," afterwards printed in 1840; in 1840 appeared
"Chartism," in 1843 "Past and Present," and in 1850 "Latter-Day
Pamphlets"; all on what he called the "Condition-of-England-Question,"
which to the last he regarded, as a subject of the realm, the most
serious question of the time, seeing, as he all along taught and felt,
the social life affects the individual life to the very core; in 1845 he
dug up a hero literally from the grave in his "Letters and Speeches of
Oliver Cromwell," and after writing in 185
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