musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good
and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or
paralysing caution.

WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of
the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself
in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great
revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic
glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the
humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the
manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours,
the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von
Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from
the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening
to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams,
some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill
twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The
reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are
everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to
extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his
thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range.

Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain
atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant
image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the
relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite
his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle
was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of