Category: Biographies
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 prese...
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...
2. Part 2In 1784, soon after Burns's return home, his father died, leaving his affairs in utter ruin. Three months before his death Robert and Gilbert had taken the farm of Mossgiel, in...
3. Part 3Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on us in Robert Burns; but with queenlike indifference she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no {11} moment; and it was defa...
4. Part 4When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains; When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, Or stately Lugar's _mossy_ fountains _b...
5. Part 5It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher's[66] aphorism is true, shall we account th...
6. Part 6"As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, "I may truly say, _Virgilium vidi tantum_.[87] I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-87, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling e...
7. Part 7Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of hi...
8. Part 8[11] Carlyle's judgment on Lockhart's work seems to have improved with reflection. In a letter to his brother, June 10, 1828, he writes: "Lockhart had written a kind of _Life of...