It was after this that I wrote what was called the “Militia Pamphlet,” which had a great and unexpected success; it hit the tone of the country, which was irritated at the refusal to allow the establishment of a militia in Scotland.

The year 1760 was the most important of my life, for before the end of it I was united with the most valuable friend and companion that any mortal ever possessed.  I owed my good fortune to the friendship of John Home, who pointed out the young lady to me as a proper object of suit, without which I should never have attempted it, for she was then just past seventeen, when I was thirty-eight.  With a superior understanding and great discernment for her age, she had an ease and propriety of manners which made her much distinguished in every company.  She had not one selfish corner in her whole soul, and was willing to sacrifice her life for those she loved.

* * * * *

THOMAS CARLYLE

Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell

Thomas Carlyle, the celebrated literary moralist, was born at Ecclefechan, Scotland, Dec. 4, 1795.  He was educated at the village school and at the Annan Grammar School, proceeding to Edinburgh University in 1809.  The breakdown of his dogmatic beliefs made it impossible for him to enter the clerical profession, and neither school-teaching nor the study of law attracted him.  Supporting himself by private teaching, Carlyle made the beginnings of a literary connection.  He fought his way under great difficulties; he was hard to govern; he was a painfully slow writer; and ignorance and rusticity mar his work to the very end.  Yet a fiery revolt against impostures, an ardent sympathy for humanity, a worship of the heroic, an immutable confidence in the eternal verities, and occasionally a wonderful perception of beauty, made Carlyle one of the most influential English writers of the nineteenth century.  His marriage in 1826 with Jane Baillie Welsh was an unhappy one.  Carlyle died on February 4, 1881, having survived his wife fifteen years.  The three volumes of “Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,” with elucidations by Carlyle, were published in 1845; the first work, one might say, conveying a sympathetic appreciation of the great Protector, all histories of the man and his times having been hitherto written from the point of view either of the Royalists or of the revolutionary Whigs.  To neither of these was an understanding of Puritanism at all possible.  Moreover, to the Cavaliers, Cromwell was a regicide; to the Whigs he was a military usurper who dissolved parliaments.  To both he was a Puritan who applied Biblical phraseology to practical affairs—­therefore, a canting hypocrite, though undoubtedly a man of great capacity and rugged force.

I.—­Puritan Oliver