prevent his interesting us.  He was not quite finished in his parental existence.  The bricklayer’s mortar of his father’s calling stuck to his fingers through life, but only as the soil he turned with his ploughshare clung to the fingers of Burns.  We do not wish either to have been other than what he was.  Their breeding brings them to the average level, carries them more nearly to the heart, makes them a simpler expression of our common humanity.  As we rolled in the cars by Ecclefechan, I strained my eyes to take in every point of the landscape, every cottage, every spire, if by any chance I could find one in that lonely region.  There was not a bridge nor a bit of masonry of any kind that I did not eagerly scrutinize, to see if it were solid and honest enough to have been built by Carlyle’s father.  Solitary enough the country looked.  I admired Mr. Emerson’s devotion in seeking his friend in his bare home among what he describes as the “desolate heathery hills” about Craigenputtock, which were, I suppose, much like the region through which we were passing.

It is one of the regrets of my life that I never saw or heard Carlyle.  Nature, who seems to be fond of trios, has given us three dogmatists, all of whom greatly interested their own generation, and whose personality, especially in the case of the first and the last of the trio, still interests us,—­Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle.  Each was an oracle in his way, but unfortunately oracles are fallible to their descendants.  The author of “Taxation no Tyranny” had wholesale opinions, and pretty harsh ones, about us Americans, and did not soften them in expression:  “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”  We smile complacently when we read this outburst, which Mr. Croker calls in question, but which agrees with his saying in the presence of Miss Seward, “I am willing to love all mankind except an American.”

A generation or two later comes along Coleridge, with his circle of reverential listeners.  He says of Johnson that his fame rests principally upon Boswell, and that “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.”  As to Coleridge himself, his contemporaries hardly know how to set bounds to their exaltation of his genius.  Dibdin comes pretty near going into rhetorical hysterics in reporting a conversation of Coleridge’s to which he listened:  “The auditors seemed to be wrapt in wonder and delight, as one observation more profound, or clothed in more forcible language, than another fell from his tongue....  As I retired homeward I thought a SECOND JOHNSON had visited the earth to make wise the sons of men.”  And De Quincey speaks of him as “the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet existed amongst men.”  One is sometimes tempted to wish that the superlative could be abolished, or its use allowed only to old experts.  What are men to do when they get to heaven, after having exhausted their vocabulary of admiration on earth?