truthfulness he saw in Burns which constrained Carlyle’s affection,—­the poet’s sympathy and humanity, speaking out of his heart in unconscious earnestness and plaintive melody; sad and sorrowful, of course, since his life was an unsuccessful battle with himself, but free from egotism, and full of a love which no misery could crush,—­so unlike that other greatest poet of our century, “whose exemplar was Satan, the hero of his poetry and the model of his life.”  In this most beautiful and finished essay Carlyle paints the man in his true colors,—­sinning and sinned against, courageous while yielding, poor but proud, scornful yet affectionate; singing in matchless lyrics the sentiments of the people from whom he sprung and among whom he died, which lyrics, though but fragments indeed, are precious and imperishable.

In the same year appeared the Life of Heyne,—­the great German scholar, pushing his way from the depths of poverty and obscurity, by force of patient industry and genius, to a proud position and a national fame.  “Let no unfriended son of genius despair,” exclaims Carlyle.  “If he have the will, the power will not be denied him.  Like the acorn, carelessly cast abroad in the wilderness, yet it rises to be an oak; on the wild soil it nourishes itself; it defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years.”  The whole outward life of Carlyle himself, like that of Heyne, was an example of heroism amid difficulties, and hope amid the storms.

The next noticeable article which Carlyle published was on Voltaire, and appeared in the Quarterly Review in 1829.  It would appear that he hoped to find in this great oracle and guide of the eighteenth century something to admire and praise commensurate with his great fame.  But vainly.  Voltaire, though fortunate beyond example in literary history, versatile, laborious, brilliant in style,—­poet, satirist, historian, and essayist,—­seemed to Carlyle to be superficial, irreligious, and egotistical.  The critic ascribes his power to ridicule,—­a Lucian, who destroyed but did not reconstruct; worldly, material, sceptical, defiant, utterly lacking that earnestness without which nothing permanently great can be effected.  Carlyle says:—­

“Voltaire read history, not with the eye of a devout seer, or even critic, but through a pair of mere anti-Catholic spectacles.  It is not a mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of infinitude, with suns for lamps and eternity as a background, whose author is God and whose purport leads to the throne of God, but a poor, wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopedie and the Sorbonne.”