Carlyle personally and in his writings Author:David Masson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. Carlyle's Literary Life And His Creed. A Peculiarity of Carlyle's literary life is that it was so late in beginning, or at least in arriving at... more » the stage of success and notoriety. Keats, who was born exactly in the same year with Carlyle, had done all his work, and gone to his grave in Rome, at the age of five-and-twenty, before Carlyle had been so much as heard of. Shelley, who was but three years Carlyle's senior, died in 1822, the year after Keats, at the age of not quite thirty; and Byron, who was Carlyle's senior but by eight years, died in 1824, at the age of thirty-six. In British Literary Chronology all these three had been strictly Carlyle's coevals; each ofthem had blazed into celebrity within sight of Carlyle after he was old enough to take note of them and be interested; and yet, in 1824, when the last of them had gone, Carlyle, though in his twenty-ninth year, was an unknown man. To those closest about him and most intimate with him he was but a restless Annandale eccentric, who, having given up the church, and given up schoolmastering, and given up the law, and taken farewell also of those mathematical studies to which he had been originally inclined, was living on in Scotland, and mainly in Edinburgh, in a lucky private tutorship which had come in his way, and was struggling obscurely into literature by translations from the German and by anonymous articles in several Edinburgh and London periodicals. Had Carlyle died in 1824, the tradition of his existence would have been of the faintest. To us, looking back now, and aware of all that was to come, it is as if Carlyle's unusual longevity had been already decreed, and there was no need felt for hurry. In fact, in BritishLiterary History, as distinct from British Literary Chronology, he belongs to...« less