[926]. Life, p. 309 sq., ed. cit.
[927]. Life, p. 343 ed. cit.
[928]. He was thirty-eight.
[929]. One of the injustices is curious from a man of Scottish blood, though every Englishman would commit it, as I own I should have done till very late in my reviewing life. It is the satire on the comparison of a woman’s eyes to dew on “a bramble,” which of course in England means a bush, and in Scotland a berry. I wonder whether R. L. S. meant to appease the other poor Robert’s manes when he wrote the phrase “eyes of gold and bramble-dew,” and I should have asked him had Fate permitted.
[930]. It may seem whimsical: but I doubt whether any one of a really critical ethos would put down, even in his private diary, that a private enemy and a hostile reviewer was “a bad, a very bad man, a scandal to politics and letters.” Criticism herself would, I think, condescend to give any of her favourite children’s ears an Apollonian twitch.
[931]. Carlyle was an older man than Macaulay, but he began to publish original work later.
[932]. Any one anxious really to appreciate Carlyle’s potentia as a literary critic may be specially commended to this. It was written, of course, not merely before he developed his own style, but before the freer modern criticism had been largely developed by anybody except apart-dwelling stars like Coleridge. But it brands the author as a great critic if he chose. He did not wholly choose: and, later, he refused.
[933]. London, 1896.
[934]. Not that all Taylor’s ideas were preposterous. He and others of the Norwich School would make a good excursus. Even the “quotidian and stimulant” theory, of which Carlyle makes such fun, might have a chance with Carlyle’s own “highest aim of a nation.”
[935]. More especially those on the Nibelungenlied and Early German Poetry generally. These could hardly have been better done.