IN caelyle's countey 59 



the Carlyles. Generally, in great men who emerge 

 from obscure peasant homes, the genius of the family 

 takes an enormous leap, or is completely metamor- 

 phosed; but Carlyle keeps all the paternal linea- 

 ments unfaded; he is his father and his mother, 

 touched to finer issues. That wonderful speech of 

 his sire, which all who knew him feared, has lost 

 nothing in the son, but is tremendously augmented, 

 and cuts like a Damascus sword, or crushes like a 

 sledge-hammer. The strongest and finest paternal 

 traits have survived in him. Indeed, a little con- 

 genital rill seems to have come all the way down 

 from the old vikings. Carlyle is not merely Scotch ; 

 he is Norselandic. There is a marked Scandinavian 

 flavor in him; a touch, or more than a touch, of 

 the rude, brawling, bullying, hard-hitting, wrest- 

 ling viking times. The hammer of Thor antedates 

 the hammer of his stone-mason sire in him. He is 

 Scotland, past and present, moral and physical. 

 John Knox and the Covenanters survive in him: 

 witness his religious zeal, his depth and solemnity 

 of conviction, his strugglings and agonizings, his 

 "conversion." Ossian survives in him : behold that 

 melancholy retrospect, that gloom, that melodious 

 wail. And especially, as I have said, do his imme- 

 diate ancestors survive in him, — his sturdy, toil- 

 ing, fiery-tongued, clannish yeoman progenitors: 

 all are summed up here ; this is the net result avail- 

 able for literature in the nineteenth century. 



Carlyle's heart was always here in Scotland. A 

 vague, yearning homesickness seemed ever to pos- 



