[[110]] This cry of indignation at the absorption of men in the cares of this world, and their indifference to higher things, occurs repeatedly in Carlyle.
[[111]] Every reader should have a clear idea, not necessarily of the details in the lives of these men, but of the general significance of each in the history of the world.
[[112]] Matthew v. 12; and compare Luke vi. 23.
[[113]] There is an allusion to Ephesians iv. 8.
[[114]] This moral is worked out with wonderful power in Sartor Resartus.
[[115]] The word means simply restorer; but Carlyle uses it to denote a man who uses his literary talent merely to give amusement, not to inculcate truth. Here again is a veiled sneer at Byron and Scott.
[[116]] See Paradise Lost, vii. 24-31.
[[117]] The Araucana is the best of a score of epics written in the reign of Philip II. of Spain in imitation of the Italian poets Ariosto and Tasso. Its author, Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga (1533-1595), writes of the Spanish campaigns against the Indians of Arauco, in which he himself took part. The early part of the poem was written in the field, in the manner that Carlyle describes. The Araucana is now little read; and its author is no way comparable to the great epic poets of Italy and England.
[[118]] Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) is one of Carlyle's favorite authors, and one of those who influenced him most. He is the subject of Carlyle's first essay in the Edinburgh Review (1827), and is treated again in another and a greater essay in the Foreign Review (1830). These two papers by Carlyle remain among the best accounts of Richter accessible in English.
[[119]] "I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about me, in order to study the sentiments, the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid unyielding independence, the desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship in that great personage—Satan."—Letter of Burns, quoted in Lockhart, chap. vi.