the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with
the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could
never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent,
dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer.
He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals,
self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost
mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one
exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with
reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself,
violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet,
in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent
inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord
Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other
was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than
Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely
different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge
Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the
other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society.
Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged
and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made
constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism;
Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts
are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely,
defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an
audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it.
In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there
is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere,"
in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous
incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering
belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the