life was largely one of work and self-denial. He was born of
poor parents at the little village of Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire,
Scotland. His father, though an uneducated stone-mason, was a man of
great mental force and originality, while his mother was a woman of
fine imagination, with a large gift of story telling. The boy received
the groundwork of a good education and then walked eighty miles to
Edinburgh University. Born in 1795, Carlyle went to Edinburgh in 1809.
His painful economy at college laid the foundation of the dyspepsia
which troubled him all his days, hampered his work and made him take a
gloomy view of life. At Edinburgh he made a specialty of mathematics
and German. He remained at the university five years.

The next fifteen years were spent in tutoring, hack writing for the
publishers and translation from the German. His first remunerative
work was the translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, a version
which still remains the best in English. After his marriage to Jane
Welsh he was driven by poverty to take refuge on his wife's lonely
farm at Craigenputtock, where he did much reading and wrote the early
essays which contain some of his best work. The EDINBURGH REVIEW and
FRASER'S were opened to him.

Finally, in 1833, when he was nearly forty years old, he made his
first literary hit with _Sartor Resartus_ which called out a storm of
caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the
strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug
English public regarded with reverence--all these features aroused
irritation. Four years later came _The French Revolution_, which
established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers.
From this time on he was freed from the fear of poverty, but it was
only in his last years, when he needed little, that he enjoyed an
income worthy of his labors.

Carlyle's great books, beside those I have mentioned, are the lives of
_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick the Great_. These are too long for
general reading, but a single volume condensation of the _Frederick_
gives a good idea of Carlyle's method of combining biography and
history. Carlyle outlived all his contemporaries--a lonely old man,
full of bitter remorse over imaginary neglect of his wife, and full
also of despair over the democratic tendencies of the age, which he
regarded as the outward signs of national degeneracy.

Carlyle's fame was clouded thirty years ago by the u