George IV, nearly a hundred and thirty years later. For absolute
truthfulness of detail the 'History' cannot always be depended on, but to
the general reader its great literary merits are likely to seem full
compensation for its inaccuracies.

THOMAS CARLYLE. The intense spiritual striving which was so foreign to
Macaulay's practical nature first appears among the Victorians in the
Scotsman Thomas Carlyle, a social and religious prophet, lay-preacher, and
prose-poet, one of the most eccentric but one of the most stimulating of
all English writers. The descendant of a warlike Scottish Border clan and
the son of a stone-mason who is described as 'an awful fighter,' Carlyle
was born in 1795 in the village of Ecclefechan, just across the line from
England, and not far from Burns' county of Ayr. His fierce, intolerant,
melancholy, and inwardly sensitive spirit, together with his poverty,
rendered him miserable throughout his school days, though he secured,
through his father's sympathy, a sound elementary education. He tramped on
foot the ninety miles from Ecclefechan to Edinburgh University, and
remained there for four years; but among the subjects of study he cared
only for mathematics, and he left at the age of seventeen without receiving
a degree. From this time for many years his life was a painful struggle, a
struggle to earn his living, to make a place in the world, and to find
himself in the midst of his spiritual doubts and the physical distress
caused by lifelong dyspepsia and insomnia. For some years and in various
places he taught school and received private pupils, for very meager wages,
latterly in Edinburgh, where he also did literary hack-work. He had planned
at first to be a minister, but the unorthodoxy of his opinions rendered
this impossible; and he also studied law only to abandon it. One of the
most important forces in this period of his slow preparation was his study
of German and his absorption of the idealistic philosophy of Kant,
Schelling, and Fichte, of the broad philosophic influence of Goethe, and