Dept. of Education Library Edue T 811.745.455 MAY 14 1913 KANSFERRED TO HARYARD COLLEGE LIBRARY COPYRIGHT, 1912 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY PRESS OF T. MOREY & SON CARLYLE'S LIFE AND WORKS SELDOM can a more congenial task fall to the hands of a critic than that which came to Thomas Carlyle in reviewing Lockhart's Life of Burns. This biography was the immediate text or occasion of Carlyle's essay on the poet. But behind it was an experience of life so similar to that of Burns that it bred in Carlyle a penetrating sympathy and comprehension. Carlyle like Burns had sprung straight from the soil of Scotland; he, too, was a peasant born (1795) in a three-roomed cottage, which his father, James Carlyle, had built with his own hands at Ecclefechan, ten miles across from the English border. He, too, was bred to the bitter uses of poverty. His mother, Margaret Aitken Carlyle, learned to write in order that she might send letters to her son when he had left home; his brothers and sisters worked on the farm with hard manual toil. "Often," says Carlyle, "we have lived for months on porridge and potatoes with no other condiment than what our own cow yielded." Only sheer force of genius lifted Carlyle, and that tardily in life, above the almost overwhelming obstacles that beset him. With such a background, how well fitted was he to interpret the struggle of another Scotch writer born into like conditions. Burns was only one year older than Carlyle's father, who once had seen the poet. James Carlyle, 'standing in Bob Scott's smithy, heard some one say, "There is the poet Burns.' He went to look and saw a man with boots on, like a well-dressed farmer, walking down on the opposite side of the burn." Though James Carlyle never read three pages of Burns in all his life, the tradition of this glimpse of the poet passed down to his son Thomas Carlyle, and made Burns seem more intimately a part of his neighborhood. Burns was, indeed, born not far away in Ayr of the Lowlands, looked on much the same physical environment, fought much the same battle against desperate poverty. And so when Carlyle writes on Burns, it is as one who has met life on the same terms. Carlyle's essay shows a justness of insight, a tenderness of understanding, such as a critic achieves only in the happiest moments. Among Carlyle's voluminous works, this discriminating tribute from one great Scotsman to another, remains one of his acknowledged masterpieces. Long years of preparation, of course, preceded this essay on Burns, which was written when Carlyle was thirtythree years old. The Scotch passion for education, which has sent many a penniless lad from a peasant farm to the |