THOMAS CARLYLE




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all
in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the
spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an
intellectual chain.

DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the
scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary,
which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some
points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid
temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking
Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau.

ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local
genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people,
spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge
between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was
also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the
century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master