The Riverside Literature Series
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 theEdinburgh Review for December, 1828. Though in forma review of the Life of Robert Burns, by John GibsonLockhart, it is really, like many of the articles in theEdinburgh Review, an entirely independent work. Thepresent art of book reviewing is a creation of our owntimes. The English magazines of the eighteenth centurywere mere publishers' organs, and are inferior to evensecond-rate periodicals of our own day. The book noticesin them are comparable to those that we see in our poorerdaily newspapers. The reviewers were usually mereliterary hacks, and were content to give a summary of thecontents of a book, and then pass judgment on it as a whole,meting out praise or blame in set, formal terms. Thefoundation of the Edinburgh Review, in 1802, by Jeffrey,Sydney Smith, Brougham, and others, marks the beginningof a new era in English periodical literature. The newmagazine had for contributors men of marked learningand originality, leaders in the thought of their time, whowere not satisfied, in reviewing a book, with recording theimpression that any sane man would gather from a casualreading, but took the title of the book as the text for athoroughly original treatment of its subject. Succeedingperiodicals, as the Quarterly and Blackwood's, howevermuch they differed from the Edinburgh in politics andgeneral tendencies, were all affected by its methods. Soit happens that many book reviews in the English magazines,by men like Carlyle, Macaulay, and Matthew Arnold,have become permanent additions to literature, sometimessurpassing in interest the works that occasioned them.
In the present case, however, the book reviewed continuesto be a standard authority. Its author, John GibsonLockhart, was born in 1794, at Cambusnethan, about twelvemiles southeast of Glasgow. When Blackwood's Magazinewas founded, in 1817, Lockhart became one of its chiefcontributors. In 1820 he married the eldest daughter ofSir Walter Scott. In the years following his marriage hepublished several novels, an edition of Don Quixote, andhis translations of Ancient Spanish Ballads. This lastwork has never been superseded, and is often reprinted.In 1826 he became editor of the Quarterly Review, andretained the position until the year before his death, in1854. His Life of Robert Burns appeared in 1828, and aLife of Napoleon Bonaparte in the next year. His greatestwork, the Life of Scott, appeared in 1836-38, and bygeneral consent has taken in English biographical literaturea place second only to that of Boswell's Life of Johnson.