The boy received
the groundwork of a good education and then walked eighty miles to
Edinburgh University. Born in 1795, Carlyle went to Edinburgh in 1809.
His painful economy at college laid the foundation of the dyspepsia
which troubled him all his days, hampered his work and made him take a
gloomy view of life. At Edinburgh he made a specialty of mathematics
and German. He remained at the university five years.
The next fifteen years were spent in tutoring, hack writing for the
publishers and translation from the German. His first remunerative
work was the translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, a version
which still remains the best in English. After his marriage to Jane
Welsh he was driven by poverty to take refuge on his wife's lonely
farm at Craigenputtock, where he did much reading and wrote the early
essays which contain some of his best work. The EDINBURGH REVIEW and
FRASER'S were opened to him.
Finally, in 1833, when he was nearly forty years old, he made his
first literary hit with _Sartor Resartus_ which called out a storm of
caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the
strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug
English public regarded with reverence--all these features aroused
irritation. Four years later came _The French Revolution_, which
established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of English writers.
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