The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the
citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient
name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and,
only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His
career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth,
from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown.
Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a
sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the
Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is
accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends
in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from
America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to
their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill,
passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached
at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a
sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often
by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as
senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the
builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the
pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists
whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism.
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