splenetic! Your disappointments are 'trifles light as air' when compared with the vexations and disappointments I have experienced. I was vexed and grieved to the very soul and beyond the soul, to go to Galloway and be deprived of the pleasure of something you know nothing about. I was disappointed on my return at finding her in a devil of a bad shy humour. I was but why do I talk to you about such things? There are joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, with which a Stoic Platonic humdrum bookworm sort of fellow like you, Sir, intermeddleth not, and consequently can have no idea of. I was disappointed in Bonaparte's escaping to Paris when he ought to have been taken prisoner by the allies at Leipsic. I was disappointed at your not mentioning anything about our old acquaintances at Edinburgh. Last night there was a flag on the mail, and to-night when I expected a Gazette announcing some great victory, the taking of Bayonne or the marching of Wellington to Bourdeaux, I was disappointed that the cause of all the rejoicing was an engagement with the French under the walls of Bayonne, in which we lost upwards of 500 men killed and 3,000 wounded, and drew off the remainder of our army safe from the destroying weapons of the enemy. I was disappointed last Sunday, after I had got my stockings on, to find that there was a hole in the heel of one of them. I read a great many books at Kirkton, and was disappointed at finding faults in almost every one of them. I will be disappointed; but what signifies going on at this rate? Unmixed happiness is not the lot of man "Of chance and change, oh! let not man complain, Else never, never, will he cease to wail.' The weather is dull; I am melancholy. Good night. P.S.-My dearest Dean,-The weather is quite altered. The wind has veered about to the North. I am in good spirits, am happy. From the same. Castlebank, May 9, 1814. Dear Doctor, I received yours last night, and a scurrilous, blackguarding, flattering, vexing, pernicked, humorous, witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer it piecemeal as a certain Honourable House does a speech from its Sovereign, by echoing back each syllable? No. This won't do. Oh! how I envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an offhand way, ever varying the scene with wit and mirth, while honest Peter must hold on in one numskull track to all eternity pursuing the even tenour of his way, so that one of Peter's letters is as good as a thousand. You seem to take a friendly concern in my affaires de cœur. By the bye, now, Jonathan, without telling you any particulars of my situation in these matters, which is scarcely known to myself, can't I advise you to fall in love? Granting as I do that it is attended with sorrows, still, Doctor, these are amply compensated by the tendency that this tender passion has to ameliorate the heart, 'provided always, and be it further enacted,' that, chaste as Don Quixote or Don Quixote's horse, your heart never breathes a wish that angels may not register. Only have care of this, Dean, and fall in love as soon as you can-you will be the better for it. Pages follow of excellent criticism from Peter on Leyden's poems, on the Duke of Wellington, Miss Porter, &c. Carlyle has told him that he was looking for a subject for an epic poem. Peter gives him a tragi-comic description of a wedding at Middlebie, with the return home in a tempest, which he thinks will answer; and concludes :— Your reflections on the fall of Napoleon bring to my mind an observation of a friend of mine the other day. I was repeating these lines in Shakespeare and applying them to Bony 'But yesterday the word of Cæsar might Have stood against the world; now lies he there, 'Aye, very true,' quoth he; 'the fallow could na be content wi' maist all Europe, and now he's glad o' Elba room.' 6 Now, Doctor, let me repeat my instructions to you in a few words. Write immediately a very long letter; write an epic poem as soon as may be. Send me some more remarks.' Tell me how you are, how you are spending your time in Edinburgh. Fall in love as soon as you can meet with a proper object. Ever be a friend to Pindar, and thou shalt always find one in the heart-subdued, not subduing PETER. In default of writings of his own, none of which survive out of this early period, such lineaments of Carlyle as appear through these letters are not without instructiveness. Having finished his college course, Carlyle looked out for pupils to maintain himself. The ministry was still his formal destination, but several years had still to elapse before a final resolution would be necessary-four years if he remained in Edinburgh attending lectures in the Divinity Hall; six if he preferred to be a rural Divinity student, presenting himself once in every twelve months at the University and reading a discourse. He did not wish to hasten matters, and, the pupil business being precarious and the mathematical tutorship at Annan falling vacant, Carlyle offered for it and was elected by competition in 1814. He never liked teaching. The recommendation of the place was the sixty or seventy pounds a year of salary, which relieved his father of further expense upon him, and enabled him to put by a little money every year, to be of use in future either to himself or his family. In other respects the life at Annan was only disagreeable to him. His tutor's work he did scrupulously well, but the society of a country town had no interest for him. He would not visit. He lived alone, shutting himself up with his books, disliked the business more and more, and came finally to hate it. Annan had indeed but one recommendation- that he was within reach of his family, especially of his mother, to whom he was attached with a real passion. His father had by this time given up business at Ecclefechan, and had taken a farm in the neighbourhood. The Great North Road which runs through the village rises gradually into an upland treeless grass country. About two miles distant on the left-hand side as you go towards Lockerby, there stands, about three hundred yards in from the road, a solitary low white-washed house, with a few poor outbuildings attached to it. This is Mainhill, which was now for many years to be Carlyle's home, where he first learned German, studied Faust in a dry ditch, and completed his translation of Wilhelm Meister. The house itself is, or was when the Carlyles occupied it, of one story, and consisted of three rooms, a kitchen, a small bed room, and a large one connected by a passage. The door opens into a square farmyard, on one side of which are stables, on the side opposite the door the cow byres, on the third a washhouse and dairy. The situation is high, utterly bleak and swept by all the winds. Not a tree shelters the house; the fences are low, the wind permitting nothing to grow but stunted thorn. The view alone redeems the dreariness of the situation. On the left is the great hill of Burnswark. Annandale stretches in front down to the Solway, which shines like a long silver riband; on the right is Hoddam Hill with the Tower of Repentance on its crest, and the wooded slopes which mark the line of the river. Beyond Hoddam towers up Criffel, and in the far distance Skiddaw, and Saddleback, and Helvellyn, and the high Cumberland ridges on the track of the Roman wall. Here lived Carlyle's father and mother with their eight children, Carlyle himself spending his holidays with them; the old man and his younger sons cultivating the sour soil and winning a hard-earned living out of it, the mother and daughters doing the household work and minding cows and poultry, and taking their turn in the field with the rest in harvest time. So two years passed away. Of Carlyle's own writing during this period there is still nothing preserved, but his correspondence continued, and from these letters glimpses can be gathered of his temper and occupations. He was mainly busy with mathematics, but he was reading incessantly, Hume's Essays among other books. He was looking out into the world, meditating on the fall of Napoleon, on the French Revolution, and thinking much of the suffering in Scotland which followed the close of the war. There were sarcastic sketches, too, of the families with which he was thrown in Annan and the neighbourhood. Robert Mitchell (an Edinburgh student who had become master of a school at Ruthwell) rallies him on having reduced the fair and fat academicians into scorched, singed, and shrivelled hags;' and hinting a warning against the temper with respect to this world which we are sometimes apt to entertain,' he suggests that young men like him and his correspondent ought to think how many are worse off than they,' should be thankful for what they had, and should not allow imagination to create unreal distresses.' 6 To another friend, Thomas Murray, author afterwards of a history of Galloway, Carlyle had complained of his fate in a light and less bitter spirit. To an epistle written in this tone Murray replied with a description of Carlyle's style, which deserves a place if but for the fulfilment of the prophecy which it contains. 5 Carnegie Street, July 27, 1816? I have had the pleasure of receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly letter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of expression, and an affectionate pathos which indicate a peculiar turn of mind, make sincerity doubly striking and wit doubly poignant. You flatter me with saying my letter was good; but allow me to observe that among all my elegant and respectable correspondents there is none whose manner of letter-writing I so much envy as yours. A happy flow of language either for pathos, description, or humour, and' an easy, graceful current of ideas appropriate to every subject, characterise your style. This is not adulation; I speak what I think. Your letters will always be a feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast; and the time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these our juvenile epistles will be read and probably applauded by a generation unborn, and that the name of Carlyle, at least, will be inseparably connected with the literary history of the nineteenth century. Generous ambition and perseverance will overcome every difficulty, and our great Johnson says, 'Where much is attempted something is performed.' You will, perhaps, recollect that when I conveyed you out of town in April, 1814, we were very sentimental: we said that few knew us, and still fewer took an interest in us, and that we would slip through the world inglorious and unknown. But the prospect is altered. We are probably as well known, and have made as great a figure, as any of the same standing at college, and we do not know, but will hope, what twenty years may bring forth. A letter from you every fortnight shall be answered faithfully, and will be highly delightful; and if we live to be seniors, the letters of the companions of our youth will call to mind our college scenes, endeared to us by many tender associations, and will make us forget that we are poor and old. . . . That you may be always successful and enjoy every happiness that this evanescent world can afford, and that we may meet soon, is, my dear Carlyle, the sincere wish of Yours most faithfully, ... THOMAS MURRAY. These college companions were worthy and innocent young men ; none of them, however, came to much, and Carlyle's career was now about to intersect with a life of a far more famous contemporary who flamed up a few years later into meridian splendour and then disappeared in delirium. Edward Irving was the son of a well-to-do burgess of Annan, by profession a tanner. Irving was five years older than Carlyle; he had preceded him at Annan School. He had gone then to Edinburgh University, where he had specially distinguished himself, and had been selected afterwards to manage a school. at Haddington, where his success as a teacher had been again conspicuous. Among his pupils at Haddington there was one gifted little girl who will be hereafter much heard of in these pages, Jane Baillie Welsh, daughter of a Dr. Welsh whose surgical fame was then great in that part of Scotland, a remarkable man who liked Irving and trusted his only child in his hands. The Haddington adventure had answered so well that Irving, after a year or two, was removed to a larger school at Kirkcaldy, where, though no fault was found with his teaching, he gave less complete satisfaction. A party among his patrons there thought him too severe with the boys, thought him proud, thought him this or that which they did not like. The dissentients resolved at last to have a second school of their own to be managed in a different fashion, and they applied to the classical and mathematical professors at Edinburgh to recommend them a master. Professor Christieson and Professor Leslie, who had noticed Carlyle more than he was aware of, had decided that he was the fittest person that they knew of; and in the summer of 1816 notice of the offered preferment was sent down to him at Annan. He had seen Irving's face occasionally in Ecclefechan Church, and once afterwards, when Irving, fresh from his college distinctions, had looked in upon Annan School; but they had no personal acquaintance, nor did Carlyle, while he was a master there, ever visit the Irving family. Of course, however, he was no stranger to the reputation of their brilliant son, with whose fame all Annandale was ringing, and with whom kind friends had compared him to his own disadvantage. I (he says) had heard much of Irving all along, how distinguished in studies, how splendidly successful as a teacher, how two professors had sent him out to Haddington, and how his new academy and new methods were illuminating and astonishing everything there. I don't remember any malicious envy towards this great Irving of the distance for his greatness in study and learning. I certainly might have had a tendency hadn't I struggled against it, and tried to make it emulation. Do the like, do the like under difficulties.' In the winter of 1815 Carlyle for the first time personally met Irving, and the beginning of the acquaintance was not promising. He was still pursuing his Divinity course. Candidates who could not attend the regular lectures at the University came up once a year and delivered an address of some kind in the Divinity Hall. One already he had given in the first year of his Annan mastership-an English sermon on the text 'Before I was afflicted I went astray,' &c. He calls it a weak flowery sentimental piece,' for which, however, he had been complimented by comrades and professors.' His next was a discourse in Latin on the question whether there was or was not such a thing as Natural Religion.' This, too, he says, was 'weak enough.' It is lost, and nothing is left to show the view which he took about the matter. But here also he gave satisfaction, and was innocently pleased with himself. It was on this occasion that he fell in accidentally with Irving at a friend's rooms in Edinburgh, and there was a trifling skirmish of tongue between them, where Irving found the laugh turned against him. A few months after came Carlyle's appointment to Kirkcaldy as Irving's quasi rival, and perhaps he felt a little uneasy as to the terms on which they might stand towards each other. His alarms, however, were pleasantly dispelled. He was to go to Kirkcaldy in the summer holidays of 1816 to see the people there and be seen by them before coming to a final arrangement. Adam Hope, one of the masters in Annan School, to whom Carlyle was much attached, and whose portrait he has painted, had just lost his wife. Carlyle had gone to sit with the old man in his sorrows, and unexpectedly fell in with Irving there, who had come on the same errand. If (he says) I had been in doubts about his reception of me, he quickly and for ever ended them by a friendliness which on wider scenes might have been called |