to form settled opinions.  As Gladstone said, Macaulay is “always conversing or recollecting or reading or composing, but reflecting never.”  So he wrote his brilliant Essay on Milton, which took all England by storm, and said of it afterward that it contained “scarcely a paragraph which his mature judgment approved.”  Whether he speaks or writes, he has always before him an eager audience, and he feels within him the born orator’s power to hold and fascinate.  So he gives loose rein to his enthusiasm, quotes from a hundred books, and in his delight at entertaining us forgets that the first quality of a critical or historical work is to be accurate, and the second to be interesting.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)

In marked contrast with Macaulay, the brilliant and cheerful essayist, is Thomas Carlyle, the prophet and censor of the nineteenth century.  Macaulay is the practical man of affairs, helping and rejoicing in the progress of his beloved England.  Carlyle lives apart from all practical interests, looks with distrust on the progress of his age, and tells men that truth, justice, and immortality are the only worthy objects of human endeavor.  Macaulay is delighted with material comforts; he is most at home in brilliant and fashionable company; and he writes, even when ill and suffering, with unfailing hopefulness and good nature.  Carlyle is like a Hebrew prophet just in from the desert, and the burden of his message is, “Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!” Both men are, in different ways, typical of the century, and somewhere between the two extremes—­the practical, helpful activity of Macaulay and the spiritual agony and conflict of Carlyle—­we shall find the measure of an age which has left the deepest impress upon our own.

LIFE OF CARLYLE.  Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, in 1795, a few months before Burns’s death, and before Scott had published his first work.  Like Burns, he came of peasant stock,—­strong, simple, God-fearing folk, whose influence in Carlyle’s later life is beyond calculation.  Of his mother he says, “She was too mild and peaceful for the planet she lived in”; and of his father, a stone mason, he writes, “Could I write my books as he built his houses, walk my way so manfully through this shadow world, and leave it with so little blame, it were more than all my hopes.”

Of Carlyle’s early school life we have some interesting glimpses in Sartor Resartus.  At nine years he entered the Annan grammar school, where he was bullied by the older boys, who nicknamed him Tom the Tearful.  For the teachers of those days he has only ridicule, calling them “hide-bound pedants,” and he calls the school by the suggestive German name of Hinterschlag Gymnasium.  At the wish of his parents, who intended Carlyle for the ministry, he endured this hateful school life till 1809, when he entered Edinburgh University.  There