Essay on Burns

The Riverside Literature Series
THOMAS CARLYLE
EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY GEORGE R. NOYES
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street Chicago: 158 Adams Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1896, By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company.


Carlyle's Essay on Burns was first printed in the Edinburgh Review for December, 1828. Though in form a review of the Life of Robert Burns , by John Gibson Lockhart, it is really, like many of the articles in the Edinburgh Review , an entirely independent work. The present art of book reviewing is a creation of our own times. The English magazines of the eighteenth century were mere publishers' organs, and are inferior to even second-rate periodicals of our own day. The book notices in them are comparable to those that we see in our poorer daily newspapers. The reviewers were usually mere literary hacks, and were content to give a summary of the contents of a book, and then pass judgment on it as a whole, meting out praise or blame in set, formal terms. The foundation of the Edinburgh Review , in 1802, by Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Brougham, and others, marks the beginning of a new era in English periodical literature. The new magazine had for contributors men of marked learning and originality, leaders in the thought of their time, who were not satisfied, in reviewing a book, with recording the impression that any sane man would gather from a casual reading, but took the title of the book as the text for a thoroughly original treatment of its subject. Succeeding periodicals, as the Quarterly and Blackwood's , however much they differed from the Edinburgh in politics and general tendencies, were all affected by its methods. So it happens that many book reviews in the English magazines, by men like Carlyle, Macaulay, and Matthew Arnold, have become permanent additions to literature, sometimes surpassing in interest the works that occasioned them.