at Chelsea, and who had good reason to speak of Carlyle's kindness in pecuniary and other matters, thus writes of him in his Autobiography: "I believe that what he loves better than his fault-finding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any human creature that looks suffering, and loving, and sincere; and I believe, further, that if the fellow creature were suffering only, and neither loving nor sincere, but had come to a pass of agony in this life which put him at the mercies of some good man for some last help and consolation toward his grave, even at the risk of loss to repute, and a sure amount of pain and vexation, that man, if the groan reached him in its forlornness, would be Thomas Carlyle."

Having thus, by way of Proem, endeavored to set forth somewhat of the personality of the man, we propose to consider his successive works; for it is in these, after all, that the true Biography of Carlyle is written.

II.

APPRENTICESHIP AND JOURNEY-WORK.

AT fourteen Carlyle, having studied at what we should call the academy or grammar school at Annan, entered the University of Edinburgh, where he remained seven or eight years. Edward

Irving had been his schoolfellow at Annan, and the intimacy was renewed at Edinburgh. Upon leaving the University Irving was appointed master of the school at Kirkaldy, and he invited his friend to become his assistant. In one of his talks with Milburn, Carlyle thus speaks of Irving:

EDWARD IRVING.

"I had gone through the University of Edinburgh, and had been invited by an old friend to become associated with him in the conduct of a school at Kirkaldy. It was Edward Irving-my old friend Edward Irving. Together we talked, and wrought, and thought; together we strove by virtue of birch and book to initiate the urchins into what is called the rudiments of learning; until, at length, the hand of the Lord was laid upon him, and the voice of his God spake to him, saying, ‘Arise, and get thee hence, for this is not thy rest.' And he arose and girded up his loins, and, putting the trumpet of the Almighty to his lips, he blew such a blast as that men started up with surprise, and said that the like of it had not been seen since the days of the Covenant itself.

"And from Scotland he came to this great Babel; and he stood up in the pulpit of the Hatton Garden Chapel, the eyes of him blazing and the herculean form of him erect. And the great and the learned, the high and the titled, the gifted and the beautiful, came round about him, and sat mute and spell-bound listening to his wonderful words. And they thought-for fools will ever think according to their folly, which is the law of their being-they thought that, because they were looking at him, he was looking at them. He was not look

ing at them at all. He was trying to do what no man can do and live-trying to see God face to face.

“I have heard that the eagle's eye suffers eclipse; that the curtain of darkness falls over the pupil of his eye by the steadfast gazing at the brightness of the sun. It was thus with my poor friend Irving. The fools said —let the fools have their own way; they know no better the fools said that Irving was daft-that his head was turned with the popular applause. He was not daft: he was DAZED. The curtain of darkness fell over the pupil of the eagle's eye by too steadfast gazing at the sun. In blindness and loneliness he sobbed the great heart of him to sleep."

After two years Irving and Carlyle returned from Kirkaldy to Edinburgh: Irving to enter upon the ministry, to which he felt himself called of God; Carlyle to do he knew not what. He had been destined by his father and his father's minister to be himself a minister of the Kirk of Scotland; "but now," he says, "that I had gained the years of man's estate, I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's Kirk, and it was needful that I should settle it." He settled it by determining that he could not become a minister. Forty years afterward he described the struggle through which he went. Milburn once said to him: "You seem to be the victim of dyspepsia-I had almost said a martyr. How does it come? Did you inherit it, or have you acquired it?” To which Carlyle made reply :

MENTAL STRUGGLES AND DYSPEPSIA.

"I am sure I can hardly tell, Sir. I only know that for one or two or three and twenty years of my mortal existence I was not conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach. I had grown up the healthy and hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scotch dalesman; and he was the descendant of a long line of such men that had tilled their paternal acres, and gained their threescore years and ten-or even mayhap, by reason of strength, their fourscore years—and had gone down to their graves, never a man of them the the wiser for the possession of this infernal apparatus.

"And the voice came to me, saying, 'Arise and settle the problem of thy life!' And so I entered into my chamber and closed the door, and around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition. Doubt, Fear, Unbelief, Mockery, and Scorn were there; and I arose and wrestled with them in travail and agony of spirit. Whether I ate I know not; whether I slept I know not; I only know that when I came forth again it was with the direful persuasion that I was the miserable owner of a diabolical arrangement called a stomach; and I have never been free from that knowledge from that hour to this, and I suppose that I never shall be until I am laid away in my grave."

Yet, notwithstanding the chronic ailment, Carlyle's fourscore and more years evince that he must be set down as upon the whole a healthy man. He was indeed compelled to enforce upon himself a careful but by no means a rigorous regi

men. He describes his habitual mode of life in London. To his account must, however, be added that in his capacity for tea he fairly rivals Sam Johnson, and in the matter of smoking would have been qualified for membership in old Frederick William's "Tobacco Parliament." He says: "I live with clear preference, when possible, on rustic farm produce: milk and meal, eggs, chickens, moor-mutton, white fish (salmon, veal, lamb, three things tabooed to me); reckon an innocent bread-pudding the very acme of culinary art; am accustomed to say, 'Can all the tides in nature, with all the king's treasure, make anything so good as good cream?' and, likewise, that 'the cow is the friend of man, and the French cook his enemy'; and not one day in ten drink beyond a single glass of wine."

Having closed upon himself the doors of the Kirk, he must choose some other profession. No professional career offering, he naturally betook himself to that of letters, at first with little encouragement. In 1819, Carlyle being twenty-four years of age, Irving wrote of him: "Carlyle is going away. It is very odd, indeed, that he should be sent for want of employment to the country. Of course, like every man of talent, he has gathered around this Patmos many a splendid purpose to be fulfilled and much improvement to be wrought out. He says: 'I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together, which no man can