BY 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

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay-built cottage, at Alloway in Ayrshire, in southwest Scotland. Except for the personal character of his father, his lot was that of any poor peasant lad. But the elder Burns had a natural love of learning, attended carefully to his sons' education himself, and, further, gave them as good schooling as it lay in his power to do. The teacher of Robert Burns and his younger brother Gilbert was John Murdoch, a young man of uncommon merit, who intere

Every author should be studied, as far as possible, from his own writings. Carlyle's voluminous correspondence furnishes rich materials for the history of his life and thought. The best editions of his letters are those edited by Professor Charles Eliot Norton: Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle (1814-1826), Letters of Thomas Carlyle (1826-1836), Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson . These may be supplemented by Froude's edition of the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyl

In the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like Butler,[ 2 ] "ask for bread and receive a stone;" for, in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the highest excellence that men are most forward to recognize. The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not know whether it is not an ag