SOURCE: "The English Essays," in Thomas Carlyle as a Critic of Literature, The Columbia University Press, 1910, pp. 114-38.

In the following essay, Roe discusses the only three essays Carlyle wrote on "English subjects," including Burns, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Sir Walter Scott. Roe praises the critical method employed by Carlyle but acknowledges that in the case of the essay on Johnson, Carlyle assesses the man and his ideas rather than his literary influence.

Carlyle wrote but three essays on English subjects, "Burns," "Boswell's Life of Johnson" and "Sir Walter Scott." He proposed to write others, notably one on Byron and another on "Fashionable Novels," but they never appeared, chiefly because Napier, the successor to Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review, to whom they were offered, was warned that Carlyle was a man to be feared as an intense radical and a hysterical worshipper of German divinities...