that, in spite of careful and adequate corrections by such scholars as Professor Masson and Professor Norton, the popular prejudice has largely lived on; and now, inveterate after twenty years, it is in some minds almost an incurable disease. The only fair estimate, after all, is based on a consideration of the whole correspondence, in the authentic editions, of Carlyle, his wife, and his friends.

Carlyle's cruelty and insincerity, after such a consideration, cannot stand. Even his cynicism, often bitter and towards the end violent, is not the most fundamental thing about him. "I have called my task," he wrote to Miss Welsh in June, 1826, "an Egyptian bondage, but that was a splenetic word, and came not from the heart, but from the sore throat." Almost all through his life Carlyle suffered also from sleeplessness and dyspepsia, a "rat gnawing at his stomach." "Some days," he wrote in 1823, "I suffer as much pain as would drive about three Lake poets down to Tartarus." But there was more than this." His misery," says Professor Masson aptly, "was the fretting of such a sword in such a scabbard, or in any scabbard.” Carlyle and his wife used often to joke about "the raal mental awgony in my ain inside." By disposition, too, he was moody and melancholy; and in moments of despair he was cynical enough. But the Yahoo-raillery of Swift was never his. "The former," says Mr. Augustine Birrell," pelts you with mud, as did in old days gentlemen electors their parliamentary candidates; the latter only occasionally splashes you, as does a public vehicle pursuing on a wet day its uproarious course." The doubt, moreover, which was at the bottom of the cynicism was emphatically not his chief quality. He

was certainly most unlike the cocksure Macaulay; he did doubt all through his life-doubted Christianity, things of this world and the world to come, doubted himself. But though he speaks of himself as "solitary," "eating my own heart," "bearing the fire of hell in an unguilty bosom," there were also, as Professor Masson points out, "moments of inexpressible beauty, like auroral gleams on a sky all dark." And Dr. Gordon, who knew him well, said that he was "the pleasantest and heartiest fellow in the world, and most excellent company." Nor must Carlyle's humor and his great, boisterous laugh at his own ferocity be forgotten; "those who have not heard that laugh," says Mr. Allingham, "will never know what Carlyle's talk really was." Whenever he was thrown back on ultimate things, moreover, "cornered," as it were, or whenever others looked to him for faith, he came out strongly. "Courage" was always his watchword to his suffering, doubting wife; self-confidence after a soul-searching struggle is the main point of Sartor Resartus. "Thou, too, shalt return home in honor," he says in Past and Present, "to thy far-distant Home, in honor; doubt it not if in the battle thou keep thy shield!"- this is the gospel he strove to preach.

Thomas Carlyle, born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, December 4, 1795, came of Annandale peasant stock. His father, James Carlyle, was a rugged stone-mason, "wholly a man of action," says his son, "with speech subservient thereto; ". . . with language "full of metaphor, though he knew not what metaphor was." The mother, Margaret Aitken, was a trusting, sympathetic soul, who learned to write in later years that she might correspond with her son. Not much is known of the

boy's early years. He says that he cried a great deal. In Sartor Resartus, his most autobiographic work, is pictured a man much influenced in childhood by nature, especially by rugged mountain scenery. Carlyle learned reading and arithmetic at home, at five went to a very elementary village school, and at nine entered the Annan Grammar School. There he was shy and put upon by the other boys, till finally he broke his promise to his parents not to hit back. In 1809 he walked to Edinburgh, eighty miles, and entered the university, with the purpose, at his father's wish, of preparing for the Scottish Kirk. At Edinburgh he did well in Latin and mathematics, but despised philosophy as then taught, and never mastered Greek.

Carlyle did not, however, enter the ministry. He went, instead, through an uncertain, unhappy period of teaching, studying, and hack-writing before he finally experienced, in 1821, what he called his "fire-baptism." First, in the summer of 1814 he taught mathematics in the Annan Academy, "a situation flatly contradictory to all ideals or wishes of mine." Two years later he received a position as master in a school at Kirkaldy, Fife. Here the master of a rival school, Edward Irving, "Trismegistus Irving," received him warmly and first taught him, he says, "what the communion of man with man means." The two became firm friends, and Carlyle years afterwards wrote a striking record of Irving's brilliant, brief career. Through Irving he was weaned of his mathematical bent, and he transferred his interest to history, devouring Gibbon in leisure moments. Through Irving, too, he was persuaded to give up Kirkaldy soon after the marvelous friend had himself abandoned it for Edinburgh and the ministry. Carlyle went up to the