ather than his sympathies made him
something of a master of at least the formal part of poetry, in which
Carlyle could do nothing. But essentially they were both writers of
prose; they were both men in whom the historico-politico-social
interests were much greater than the purely literary, the purely
artistic, or the purely scientific--though just as Carlyle was a bad
verse-writer or none at all, Macaulay a good one, so Carlyle was a good
mathematician, Macaulay a bad one or none at all. But in the point of
view from which they regarded the subjects with which they dealt, and in
the style in which they treated them, they were poles asunder. Indeed it
may be questioned whether "the style is the point of view" would not be
a better form of the famous deliverance than that which, in full or
truncated form, has obtained currency.

Carlyle was born on the 4th December 1795 at Ecclefechan (the Entepfuhl
of the _Sartor_), in Dumfriesshire, being the son of a stone-mason. He
was educated first at the parish school, then at that of Annan (the
nearest town), and was about fifteen when he was sent, in the usual way
of Scotch boys with some wits and no money, to the University of
Edinburgh. His destination was equally of course the Church, but he very
early developed that dislike to all fixed formularies which
characterised him through life, and which perhaps was not his greatest
characteristic. To mathematics, on the other hand, he took pretty
kindly, though he seems to have early exhausted the fascinations of
them. Like most men of no means who have little fancy for any of the
regular professions, he attempted teaching; and as a schoolmaster at
Annan, Haddington, and Kirkcaldy, or a private tutor (his chief
experience in which art was with Charles Buller), he spent no small
number of years, doing also some hack-work in the way of translating,
writing for Brewster's _Encyclopaedia_, and contributing to the _London
Magazine_, that short-lived but fertile nurse of genius. The most
remarkable of these productions was the _Life of Schiller_, which was
published as a volume in 1825, his thirtieth year, at which time he was
a resident in London and a frequenter--a not too amiable one--of
Coleridge's circle at Highgate and of other literary places.

The most important event in his life took place in 1826, when he married
Miss Jane Welsh, a young lady who traced her descent to John Knox, who
had some property, who had a genius of her own