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THOMAS CARLYLE.

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CHAPTER I.

THE SCHEME OF HIS LIFE.

I Do not know any word more fitly spoken about Carlyle

than that of Professor Masson, that there has been in his life an element of soldierly arrangement. It has not been a life at hap-hazard, but a campaign, planned with reasoning calmness, with comprehensive intelligence, and carried out with adamantine resolution. Finding, as genius has so often found, that he could not adjust himself to the professional pace and dogmatic harness which were ready for him at the close of his college course, he discovered, on the threshold of manhood, that literature was the goal at which he ought to aim, "the haven of expatriated spiritualisms," where shelter and honorable activity might await him. We are not left to conjecture in attempting to realize the spirit and the anticipations with which he entered upon a literary career. Upwards of fifty years ago, in the first book he gave to the world, he described a literary life, its dangers, its temptations, its drawbacks, its advantages; and though the passage is long, we cannot, I think, do better, in commencing our talk about him, than read it over.

THE MAN OF LETTERS.

If to know wisdom were to practise it; if fame brought true dignity and peace of mind; or happiness consisted in nourishing the intellect with its appropriate food, and surrounding the imagination with ideal beauty, a literary life would be the most enviable which the lot of this world affords. But the truth is far otherwise. The Man of Letters has no immutable, all-conquering volition, more than other men; to understand and to perform are two very different things with him as with every His fame rarely exerts a favorable influence on his dignity of char

one.

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