desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc.
Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the
lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied
in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his
opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the
modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes.
Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which
he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The
whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows
with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of
Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.--

How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this
world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its
fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea,
they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast
wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the
purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the
ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!"

On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial
intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of
the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan
predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of
severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The
_Reminiscences_ of Irving's generous reception of his protege present one
of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same
chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the
east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere
enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical