" Another critic, a Scotch writer,
could see nothing but wild impracticability in them, and exclaimed,
"Can any living man point to a single practical passage in any of
these lectures? If not, what is the real value of Mr. Carlyle's
teachings? What is Mr. Carlyle himself but a phantasm!"
The vein of Puritanism running through his writings, composed upon
the model of the German school, impressed many critics with the belief
that their author, although full of fire and energy, was perplexed and
embarrassed with his own speculations. Concerning this Puritan element
in his reflections, Mr. James Hannay remarks, "That earnestness, that
grim humour--that queer, half-sarcastic, half-sympathetic fun--is
quite Scotch. It appears in Knox and Buchanan, and it appears in
Burns. I was not surprised when a school-fellow of Carlyle's told me
that his favourite poem was, when a boy, 'Death and Doctor Hornbook.'
And if I were asked to explain this originality, I should say that he
was a covenanter coming in the wake of the eighteenth century and the
transcendental philosophy.
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