Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish peasant who became one of the great names of English literature. The story of that transformation and achievement has been told and retold by many a brilliant writer during the generation which has elapsed since Carlyle's death. No record of personal development and literary accomplishment is more fascinating. Yet it is not the aim of this book to present one more biography of Carlyle. It is rather to exhibit, as far as possible in Carlyle's own words, the working of his mind. His books are intensely, supremely personal. They review his own struggles, his slowly-won mastery over himself and his circumstances, his entire theory of human life and conduct. With a vividness almost if not quite unrivalled in the whole history of literature, they describe his ancestry and early environment, his unsystematic education, his painful quest of a career, and the spiritual conflicts by which he came to an ultimat6e command of himself. This main battle once won, he perfected, between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, his theory of biography and history. It remained essentially unchanged throughout the rest of his long life. Bliss Perry was an American educator and writer of fiction, born in Massachusetts in 1860. He was professor of oratory and aesthetic criticism at Princeton University.