In a time like our own, when literature on either side of the Atlantic lacks original energy; when the best minds are busy with criticism rather than with creation; when ephemeral story-tellers and spineless disciples of culture pass for masters, and sincere but uninspired scholars have our respect but move us not,--we shall do well to contemplate anew the man who by his personality and his books has nobly swayed two generations of the English-speaking race, and who, as the years recede, looms more and more certainly as the foremost modern British man of letters. Men may look distorted to their contemporaries, like the figures in a Chinese picture; but Time, the wisest of painters, sets them in their true perspective, gives them their just proportions, and reveals their permanent features in light and shade. And sufficient time has now elapsed for us to perceive that Carlyle belongs to that thrice-winnowed class of literary primates whom posterity crowns. He holds in the nineteenth century a position similar to Johnson’s in the eighteenth, and to Milton’s in the seventeenth,--each masterful, but in a different way; each typifying his age without losing his individuality; all brothers in preëminence. When, for convenience’ sake, we classify Carlyle among men of letters, we fail to describe him adequately. The phrase suggests too little. Charles Lamb, the lovable, is the true type of men of letters, who illuminate, sweeten, delight, and entertain us. Carlyle was far more: he was a mighty moral force, using many forms of literature--criticism, biography, history, pamphlets--as its organs of expression. He had, as the discerning Goethe said of him, “unborrowed principles of conviction,” by which he tested the world. He felt the compulsion of a great message intrusted to him. There rings through most of his utterances the uncompromising “Thus saith the Lord” of the Hebrew prophets,--a tone which, if it do not persuade us, we call arrogant, yet which speaks the voice of conscience to those who give it heed. What, then, was his message?--what those “unborrowed principles of conviction” by which he judged his time? Born in the poor village of Ecclefechan on December 4, 1795, his childhood and youth were spent amid those stern conditions by which, rather than by affluence, brave, self-reliant, earnest characters are moulded. His parents were Calvinists, to whom religion was the chief concern, and who taught him by example the severe virtues of that grim sect. Next to religion, and its active manifestation in a pious life, they prized education, begrudging themselves no sacrifices by which their son might attend the University of Edinburgh. They wished him to be a minister, but when he came to maturity he recognized his unfitness for that vocation and abandoned it. They acquiesced regretfully, little dreaming that he who refused to be confined in some Annandale pulpit should become the foremost preacher of his age.