xplicable element. Opinion oscillated between the view of James
Mill, that Carlyle was an insane rhapsodist, and that of Jeffrey, that
he was afflicted with a chronic craze for singularity. Jeffrey's verdict
sums up pretty effectively the attitude of the critics of the time to
the new writer:--'I suppose that you will treat me as something worse
than an ass, when I say that I am firmly persuaded the great source of
your extravagance, and all that makes your writings intolerable to many
and ridiculous to not a few, is not so much any real peculiarity of
opinion, as an unlucky ambition to appear more original than you are.'
The blunder made by Jeffrey in regard both to Carlyle and Wordsworth
emphasises the truth which critics seem reluctant to bear in mind, that,
before the great man can be explained, he must be appreciated.
Emphatically true of Carlyle it is that he creates the standard by which
he is judged. Carlyle resembles those products of the natural world
which biologists call 'sports'--products which, springing up in a
spontaneous and apparently erratic way, for a time defy classification.
The time is appropriate for an attempt to classify the great thinker,
whose birth took place one hundred years ago.

Towards the close of the last century a stone-mason, named James
Carlyle, started business on his own account in the village of
Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. He was an excellent tradesman, and frugal
withal; and in the year 1791 he married a distant kinswoman of his own,
Janet Carlyle, who died after giving birth to a son. In the beginning of
1795 he married one Margaret Aitken, a worthy, intelligent woman; and on
the 4th of December following a son was born, whom they called Thomas,
after his paternal grandfather. This child was destined to be the most
original writer of his time.

Little Thomas was early taught to read by his mother, and at the age of
five he learnt to 'count' from his father. He was then sent to the
village school; and in his seventh year he was reported to be 'complete'
in English. As the schoolmaster was weak in the classics, Tom was
taught the rudiments of Latin by the burgher minister, of which strict
sect James Carlyle was a zealous member. One summer morning, in 1806,
his father took him to Annan Academy. 'It was a bright morning,' he
wrote long years thereafter, 'and to me full of moment, of fluttering
boundless Hopes, saddened by parting with Mother, with Home, and which
afterwards were