precision of phrase. [He has an] admirable terse ness and distinctness of expression."-George Dawson. "The chief note of his style is an exquisite and classical The verse of Arnold is bathed in quality of touch. lucid and tranquil-light."-Horace Scudder. "Arnold's prose is luminous like a steel mirror.”—R. H. Hutton. ILLUSTRATIONS. "A few years afterwards the great English middle-class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakespeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years.”—Essay on Heinrich Heine. "One man in many millions, a Heine, may console himself and keep himself erect in suffering by a colossal irony of this sort, by covering himself and the Universe with the red fire of this sinister mockery, but the many millions cannot, cannot if they would."-Essay on Pagan and Medieval Religious Senti ment. "What Lady is this, whose silk attire Gleams so rich in the light of the fire? With the clasp of burnished gold Which her heavy robe doth hold? What place is this, and who are they? Who seems of marble on a tomb? How comes it here, this chamber bright The unquiet bright Alantic plain?" -Tristam and Iseult. CARLYLE, 1795-1881 Biographical Outline.-Thomas Carlyle, born December 4, 1795, at Ecclefechan, Dumfries, Scotland; father a stone-mason; Thomas studies at the village-school and afterward at Annan Grammar School, which he enters in 1804; in November, 1809, he enters Edinburgh University, walking the eighty miles thence from his home; his parents wish him to study for the ministry; he leaves the University in the summer of 1814, and becomes mathematical tutor in Annandale Academy at a salary of £70 per year; he makes a profound study of Newton's "Principia;" in the autumn of 1816 becomes master of a school in Kilcardy, where he forms an intimate friendship with Edward Irving, and reads history voraciously in Irving's library; is unpopular as a teacher, and resigns in October, 1818; goes to Edinburgh without a definite aim; takes up mineralogy and, incidentally, German; earns a meagre support by tutoring and translating scientific pamphlets from the French; is tortured by dyspepsia; spends the summer of 1819 on his father's farm at Mainhill, Annandale, wandering distracted about the moors, "eating my own heart, through mazes of doubt, perpetual questionings unanswered;" returns to Edinburgh in November, 1819, and resumes private teaching and attendance on law lectures; becomes disgusted with the law by March, 1820, and visits Irving at Glasgow; studies German literature at Mainhill during the summer of 1821, and writes articles for "Brewster's Cyclopædia;" in September, 1820, returns to Edinburgh, "determined to find out something stationary and "sick of this drivelling state of painful idleness; tinues private teaching and hack writing, earning a plain con living but still subject to mental temptations in the wilderness;" London booksellers refuse his proposal to make a complete translation of Schiller's works; in June, 1821, he achieves what he calls in "Sartor Resartus" his " new birth," when he "authentically took the devil by the nose;" in May, 1821, he visits Haddington, with Irving, and meets Jane Baillie Welsh, with whom Irving was then in love; Carlyle becomes her tutor in German; through Irving's aid he becomes tutor at Edinburgh in the family of Mr. Buller, a retired East India merchant, at a salary of £200; he translates Legendre's "Geometry" successfully, and contemplates various ambitious literary works; is made a familiar member of the Buller family, where he has many social advantages; in 1823 begins writing his "Life of Schiller" for the London Magazine; removes with the Bullers to Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld; continues his correspondence with Jane Welsh, who frowns upon his matrimonial advances; translates Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" in 1824, and receives good pay for it; in 1824 he first visits London, where he continues to act as tutor to Charles and Arthur Buller, and renews his intimacy with Irving, then at the height of his London fame (meanwhile Irving, though devoted to Jane Welsh, had reluctantly kept a youthful obligation by marrying a lady to whom he had become engaged years before); Carlyle meets Procter, Cunningham, Campbell, and Coleridge; resides briefly at Kew, and gives up the Buller tutorship in July, 1824; spends two months in Birmingham as the guest of one Badams, a physician and a friend of Irving, who tries to cure Carlyle's dyspepsia; takes lodgings with the Irvings at Dover in October, 1824; spends twelve days in Paris, where he meets Legendre, hears Cuvier lecture, and sees Laplace and others; returns to Dover and takes lodgings in London in the autumn of 1824; remains in London till midwinter, putting his "Life of Schiller" into final book form; becomes engaged to Jane Welsh (conditionally) in the spring of 1825; returns to his father's home at Mainhill in March, 1825, having engaged to make further translations from the German, and takes a farm at Hoddam Hill; Miss Welsh visits him and his family; gives up Hoddam Hill in 1826 and removes, with his father's family, to Scotsbrig, near Ecclefechan; marries Jane Welsh at Templand, October 17, 1826, and takes a house at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; entertains De Quincey, Hamilton, Wilson, and others; completes his "Specimens of German Romance" late in 1826; finds no remunerative occupation, and so decides to remove to his wife's moorland farm at Craigenputtock; in June, 1827, he meets Jeffrey, and engages to write for the Edinburgh Review the essays now known as the "Miscellanies;" is greatly encouraged by presents and an appreciative letter from Goethe in July, 1827; Jeffrey makes an unsuccessful effort to obtain for Carlyle, through Brougham, a chair in the new London University; an effort of Irving and others to secure for him a chair in the University of St. Andrews also fails; he leaves Edinburgh for Craigenputtock May 26, 1827; continues his contributions to the Edinburgh Review, and publishes his essay on Voltaire in the Foreign Review in April, 1829; joins the staff of the new Fraser's Magazine in May, 1830; writes Sartor Resartus" in 1831, but fails to find a publisher; spends the autumn of 1831 in London, where he meets John Stuart Mill, Leigh Hunt, and others; returns to Craigenputtock in April, 1832; corresponds with Mill; publishes his essay on Goethe in the Foreign Quarterly in July, 1832; writes his essay on Diderot, and spends the winter of 1832-33 in Edinburgh; returns in the spring to Craigenputtock (where he is visited by Emerson) and writes the "Diamond Necklace;" after receiving Thiers's History from Mill, Carlyle decides to undertake a history of the French Revolution; begins publishing "Sartor Resartus in Fraser's in November, 1833; settles, June 10, 1834, with his wife at 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, where he resides till his death; 66 "Sartor Resartus" excites "universal disapprobation; Carlyle completes the manuscript of the first volume of the "French Revolution," which is loaned to Mill and is accidentally burned; he refuses a position on the staff of the London Times; completes the second manuscript of the first volume of the "French Revolution" September 22, 1835; toils at the second volume during 1836, "mind weary, body very sick;" is comforted by Sterling and Leigh Hunt; publishes his essay on Mirabeau and the "Diamond Necklace" in 1836; Sartor Resartus" is published in America through Emerson's influence, in 1836; Carlyle completes the second volume of the "French Revolution" January 12, 1837, and publishes both volumes soon afterward; begins his first course of public lectures (on German Literature) in London, May 1, 1837; the lectures are financially successful and are followed by three more courses in three successive years, one on the History of Literature and Periods of European Culture, one on Revolutions in Modern Europe, and one on Hero Worship -all lost or imperfectly reported except the last; Carlyle becomes recognized as a social "lion," but repulses many would-be influential friends; in 1838-39 he receives, through Emerson, 150 as the profits of the American edition of "Sartor Resartus ; reviews Lockhart's "Life of Scott" in January, 1838 (in 1839 Emerson publishes in America Carlyle's "Miscellaneous Essays "); "Chartism," written in 1839 and refused by the Quarterly, is published in pamphlet form in 1840; Carlyle publishes "Heroes and HeroWorship" early in 1841, and retires to Yorkshire" to ripen or rot for awhile;" writes the preface to Emerson's Essays and little else during 1841; the death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother, in February, 1842, brings Mrs. Carlyle into a property of £200 a year; Carlyle visits Belgium briefly with the Bullers in 1842, and in 1843 visits Charles Redwood in Wales; he publishes "Past and Present" in April, 1843, and "The Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell" in December, |