[[36]] From The Brigs of Ayr. It is the fall of the new brig that is prophesied: a strange slip on Carlyle's part.
[[37]] See Iliad, xviii. and xxii. Pope's translation may be bought for a few cents; and is still in many ways the best.
[[38]] A name for a blacksmith, shortened to Burnewin, in Scotch Drink.
[[39]] These lines are incorrectly quoted from an Irish song altered by Burns, Open the Door to Me, oh! They should read:
"The wan Moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, oh:
False friends, false love, farewell! for mair
I'll ne'er trouble them nor thee, oh."
[[40]] To William Simpson. Wat, wet.
[[41]] Dugald Stewart, professor of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, in a letter published in the Life of Burns, by Dr. James Currie.
[[42]] In this sentence, as printed in the Edinburgh Review, we have certainly a trace of Jeffrey's editing (cf. above, p. 7). There, by the change of weak-eyed maudlin into extreme, and of random into pervading, the sneer is converted into a compliment. Elsewhere Carlyle says of Keats: "The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen 'Vessel of Hell.'" (Nichol: Life of Carlyle, chap. v.) Such is the absurd result to which Carlyle is led by his view of the necessity of a moral aim in all literature.
[[43]] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, January 1, 1789. The passage is also quoted in Lockhart, chap. viii.
[[44]] Struggle.