who had shared his
struggles, whom he loved and admired without stint, and whom he was
yet destined to remember with many bitter pangs of remorse. Their
story, laid bare with singular fullness, has invested the scene of
their joys and sorrows, their alienation and reconciliations, with
extraordinary interest. Every one who has read the "Reminiscences" and
the later mass of biographical matter must be glad to see the
"sound-proof" room, and the garden haunted by the "demon-fowls" and
the other dumb witnesses of a long tragi-comedy. No one was so keenly
sensitive as Carlyle to the interest of the little gleams of light
which reveal our ancestors not only stirred by the great passions, but
absorbed like ourselves by the trivialities of the day. A similar
interest will long attach to the scene of his own trials.

Carlyle's life was a struggle and a warfare. Each of his books was
wrenched from him, like the tale of the 'Ancient Mariner,' by a
spiritual agony. The early books excited the wrath of his
contemporaries, when they were not ridiculed as the grotesque
outpourings of an eccentric humorist. His teaching was intended to
oppose what most people take to be the general tendency of thought,
and yet many who share that tendency gladly acknowledge that they owe
to Carlyle a more powerful intellectual stimulus than they can
attribute even to their accepted teachers. I shall try briefly to
indicate the general nature of his message to mankind, without
attempting to consider the soundness or otherwise of particular views.

Carlyle describes what kind of person people went to see in Cheyne
Row. "The very sound of my voice," he says, "has got something
savage-prophetic: I am as a John the Baptist girt about with a leather
girdle, whose food is locusts and wild honey." Respectable literary
society at "aesthetic tea-parties" regarded him as the Scribes and
Pharisees regarded the Hebrew prophet. He came among them to tear the
mask from their hypocritical cant. Carlyle was not externally a
Diogenes. Though the son of peasants, he had the appearance and manner
of a thorough gentleman in spite of all his irritable outbreaks. But
he was not the less penetrated to the core with the idiosyncrasies of
his class. The father, a Davie Deans of real life, had impressed the
son profoundly. Carlyle had begun life on the same terms as
innumerable young Scots. Strict frugality had enabled him to get a
college training and reach the threshold of