This singer of the people’s joys and sorrows represents the soft side to a strong nature. From the scene of his last days it is but a step to Annandale, cradle of a neighbour genius that is Scotland’s boast rather than her darling. Thomas Carlyle, who ascended into such a clear heaven of contempt for the “mostly fools” of his “swindler century,” fell short of Burns in one highest point of wisdom. He knew himself hardly better than did his amazed contemporaries; and seems never to have guessed what short work some of his admired strong men would have made of one who preached the gospel of silence in such long-drawn screeds of rhetoric, rising often to a falsetto note. An unchristianised Calvinist and Covenanter; a poet “wanting the accomplishment of verse”; a painter in “hues of earthquake and eclipse”; a philosopher who “thought in a passion”; a Stoic who could not abide the crowing of a cock; an historian who “saw history in flashes of lightning”; a reformer “calling down fire from heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box”; a painful preacher who has ministered more amusement than repentance; a prophet who could not recognise the master force of his own age; a ferocious moralist and a bitter humorist, this “great imperfect man” owes much of his renown to a gnarled eccentricity which at first scared away readers, but more to the ardour that has inspired so many minds rejecting both his premises and his conclusions. To some who receive _Sartor Resartus_ into the canon of immortality, his idolatry of strength, so natural to the sedentary, bilious student, seems the weakness of his character, through which he was led to work up bloodshot halos for unscrupulous violence, from his fancy picture of Dr. Francia to his fond glorification of Frederick the Great, till at last he appears struggling to pervert his own moral judgment. A countryman of his who, but for another weakness, might have made himself better known, Patrick Proctor Alexander, has well exposed his obliquity of vision in a burlesque that shows as much wisdom as fooling; and to my mind the soundest judgment of Carlyle comes across the Atlantic from James Russell Lowell:--