Thomas Carlyle!

'Thinkers and unthinkers, by the million, are spontaneously at their post, doing what is in them.' = new description of some board, surely.

If you read Heroes and Hero Worship slowly and thoughtfully, rather than ardently, swept along by the prose, you'll discover where Carlyle's shortcomings lie. He communicates his enthusiasms and his disdains with such vigor and passion that it is easy to turn off your critical faculties, but he is a first cousin to Nietzsche and must not be taken without some grains of salt.

Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, is the literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold was ever taking up his parable -- "Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!" -- we are all sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even "culture" itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.

-- Frederic Harrison (1893)

His prose style is a wild crash of waves that's pretty gnarly whenever I manage to shoot the curl, but one of him was probably enough for the world.

as a stylist he's the English Melville.

Scottish.

better!

lol

You can take the boy out of Ecclefechan...