Carlyle retained to the end of his days a painful and indeed · resentful recollection of these school experiences of his. This,' he said of the passage just quoted from Sartor, is true, and not half the truth. Unspeakable is the damage and defilement I received from those coarse misguided tyrannous cubs. One way and another I had never been so wretched as here, and the first two years of my time I still count among the miserable of my life.'

He had obeyed his mother's injunctions. He had courage in plenty to resent ill usage, but his promise was sacred. He was passionate, but fight he would not, and every one who knows English and Scotch life will understand what his fate must have been. One consequence was a near escape from drowning. The boys had all gone to bathe; the lonely child had strayed apart from the rest, where he could escape from being tormented. He found himself in a deep pool which had been dug out for a dock and had been filled with the tide. The mere accident of some one passing at the time saved him. At length he could bear his condition no longer; he turned on the biggest bully in the school and furiously kicked him; a battle followed in which he was beaten ; but he left marks of his fists upon his adversary, which were not forgotten. He taught his companions to fear him, if only like Brasidas's mouse. He was persecuted no longer, but he carried away bitter and resentful recollections of what he had borne, which were never entirely obliterated.

The teaching which Carlyle received at Annan, he says, 'was limited, and of its kind only moderately good. Latin and French I did get to read with fluency. Latin quantity was left a frightful chaos, and I had to learn it afterwards; some geometry; algebra, arithmetic tolerably well. Vague outlines of geography I learnt; all the books I could get were also devoured. Greek consisted of the alphabet merely.' Of holidays we hear nothing, though holidays there must have been at Christmas and Midsummer; little also of school friendships or amusements. In the last, in such shape as could have been found in boys of his class in Annan, Carlyle could have had little interest. He spoke warmly of his mathematical teacher, a certain Mr. Morley from Cumberland, whom he loved much, and who taught him well.' He had formed a comradeship with one or two boys of his own age, who were not entirely uncongenial to him; but only one incident is preserved which was of real moment. In his third year Carlyle first consciously saw Edward Irving. Irving's family lived in Annan. He had himself been at the school, and had gone thence to the University of Edinburgh. He had distinguished himself there, gained prizes, and was otherwise honourably spoken of. Annan, both town and school, was proud of the brilliant lad that they had produced; and Irving one day looked in upon the school, the masters out of compliment attending him. He was scrupulously

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dressed, black coat, tight pantaloons, in the fashion of the day, and looked very neat, self-possessed, and amiable; a flourishing slip of a youth with coal-black hair, swarthy clear complexion, very straight on his feet, and, except for the glaring squint, decidedly handsome.' The boys listened eagerly as he talked in a free airy way about Edinburgh and its professors. A University man who has made a name for himself is infinitely admirable to younger ones; he is not too far above them to be comprehensible; they know what he has done, and they hope distantly that they too one day may do the like. Of course Irving did not distinguish Carlyle. He walked through the rooms and disappeared.

The Hinterschlag Gymnasium was over soon after, and Carlyle's future career was now to be decided on. The Ecclefechan family life did not look with favour on displays of precocious genius. Vanity was the last quality that such a man as James Carlyle would encourage, and there was a severity in his manner which effectively repressed a disposition to it.

We had all to complain (Carlyle says) that we dared not freely love our father. His heart seemed as if walled in. My mother has owned to me that she could never understand him, and that her affection and admiration of him were obstructed. It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear repelled us from him, me especially. My heart and tongue played freely with my mother. He had an air of deepest gravity and even sternness. He had the most entire and open contempt for idle tattle-what he called clatter. Any talk that had meaning in it he could listen to; what had no meaning in it, above all what seemed false, he absolutely could not and would not hear, but abruptly turned from it. Long may we remember his 'I don't believe thee;' his tongue-paralysing cold indifferent 'Hah.'

Besides fear, Carlyle, as he grew older, began to experience a certain awe of his father as of a person of altogether superior qualities.

None of us (he writes) will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from the untutored soul, full of metaphor, though he knew not what metaphor was, with all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with surprising accuracy-brief, energetic, conveying the most perfect picture, definite, clear, not in ambitious colours, but in full white sunlight. Emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths; his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart.

ever.

Such a father may easily have been alarming and slow to gain his children's confidence. He had silently observed his little Tom, howThe reports from the Annan masters were all favourable, and when the question rose what was to be done with him, inclined to venture the University. The wise men of Ecclefechan shook their heads. 'Educate a boy,' said one of them, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents.' Others said it was a risk, it was waste of money, there was a large family to be provided for, too much must not be spent upon one, &c. James Carlyle had seen something in his boy's character which showed him that the risk, if risk there was,

must be ventured; and to Edinburgh it was decided that Tom should go and be made a scholar of.

To English ears university life suggests splendid buildings, luxurious rooms, rich endowments as the reward of successful industry; the students as young men between nineteen and twenty-three with handsome allowances, spending each of them on an average double the largest income which James Carlyle had earned in any year of his life. Universities north of the Tweed had in those days no money prizes to offer, no fellowships and scholarships, nothing at all but an education and a discipline in poverty and self-denial. The lads who went to them were the children, for the most part, of parents as poor as Carlyle's father. They knew at what a cost the expense of sending them to college, relatively small as it was, could be afforded; and they went with the fixed purpose of making the very utmost of their time. Five months only of each year they could remain in their classes; for the rest of it they taught pupils themselves or worked on the farm at home to pay for their own learning.

Each student, as a rule, was the most promising member of the family to which he belonged, and extraordinary confidence was placed in them. They were sent to Edinburgh, Glasgow, or wherever it might be, when they were mere boys of fourteen. They had no one to look after them either on their journey or when they came to the end. They walked from their homes, being unable to pay for coachhire. They entered their own names at the college. They found their own humble lodgings, and were left entirely to their own capacity for self-conduct. The carriers brought them oatmeal, potatoes, and salt butter from the home farm, with a few eggs occasionally as a luxury. With their thrifty habits they required no other food. In the return cart their linen went back to their mothers to be washed and mended. Poverty protected them from temptations to vicious amusements. They formed their economical friendships; they shared their breakfasts and their thoughts, and had their clubs for conversation or discussion. When term was over they walked home in parties, each district having its little knot belonging to it; and, known along the roads as University scholars, they were assured of entertainment on the way.

As a training in self-dependence no better education could have been found in these islands. If the teaching had been as good as the discipline of character, the Scotch universities might have competed with the world. The teaching was the weak part. There were no funds, either in the colleges or with the students, to provide. personal instruction as at Oxford and Cambridge. The professors were individually excellent, but they had to teach large classes, and had no leisure to attend particularly to this or that promising pupil. The universities were opportunities to boys who were able to take advantage of them, and that was all.

Such was the life on which Carlyle was now to enter, and such were the circumstances of it. It was the November term, He was to be fourteen on the fourth of the approaching December. Edinburgh is nearly one hundred miles from Ecclefechan. He was to go on foot like the rest under the guardianship of a boy named Tom Smail,' two or three years his senior, who had already been at college, and was held, therefore, to be a sufficient protector.

How strangely vivid (he says in 1866), how remote and wonderful, tinged with the hues of far-off love and sadness, is that journey to me now after fifty-seven years of time! My mother and father walking with me in the dark frosty November morning through the village to set us on our way; my dear and loving mother, her tremulous affection, my &c.

Of the University he says that he learned little there. In the Latin class he was under Professor Christieson, who never noticed him nor could distinguish him from another Mr. Irving Carlyle, an older, bigger boy, with red hair, wild buck teeth, and scorched complexion, and the worst Latinist of his acquaintance.'

In the classical field (he writes elsewhere) I am truly as nothing. Homer I learnt to read in the original with difficulty, after Wolf's broad flash of light thrown into it; Eschylus and Sophocles mainly in translations. Tacitus and Virgil became really interesting to me; Homer and Eschylus above all; Horace egoistical, leichtfertig, in sad fact I never cared for; Cicero, after long and various trials, always proved a windy person and a weariness to me, extinguished altogether by Middleton's excellent though misjudging life of him.

Dugald Stewart had
Brown was the new

It was not much better with philosophy. gone away two years before Carlyle entered. professor, an eloquent, acute little gentleman, full of enthusiasm about simple and relative suggestions,' to Carlyle unprofitable utterly, and bewildering and dispiriting, as the autumn winds among withered leaves.

In mathematics only he made real progress. His temperament was impatient of uncertainties. He threw himself with delight into a form of knowledge in which the conclusions were indisputable, where at each step he could plant his foot with confidence. Professor Leslie (Sir John Leslie afterwards) discovered his talent, and exerted himself to help him with a zeal of which Carlyle never afterwards ceased to speak with gratitude. Yet even here, on ground with which he was familiar, his shy nature was unfitted for display. He carried off no prizes. He tried only once, and though he was notoriously superior to his competitors, the crowd and noise of the class room prevented him from even attempting to distinguish himself. I have heard him say late in life that his thoughts never came to him in proper form except when he was alone.

The teaching at a university is but half what is learned there; the other half, and the most important, is what young men learn from one

another. Carlyle's friends at Edinburgh, the eleven out of the eleven hundred, were of his own rank of life, sons of peasants who had their own way to make in life. From their letters, many of which have been preserved, it is clear that they were clever good lads, distinctly superior to ordinary boys of their age, Carlyle himself holding the first place in their narrow circle. Their lives were pure and simple. Nowhere in these letters is there any jesting with vice, or light allusions to it. The boys wrote to one another on the last novel of Scott or poem of Byron, on the Edinburgh Review, on the war, on the fall of Napoleon, occasionally on geometrical problems, sermons, college exercises, and divinity lectures, and again on innocent trifles, with sketches, now and then humorous and bright, of Annandale life as it was seventy years ago. They looked to Carlyle to direct their judgment and advise them in difficulties. He was the prudent one of the party, able, if money matters went wrong, to help them out of his humble savings. He was already noted, too, for power of effective speech-far too sarcastic for so young a man' was what elder people said of him. One of his correspondents addressed him always as 'Jonathan,' or 'Dean,' or 'Doctor,' as if he was to be a second Swift. Others called him Parson, perhaps from his intended profession. All foretold future greatness to him of one kind or another. They recognised that he was not like other men, that he was superior to other men, in character as well as intellect. 'Knowing how you abhor all affectation' is an expression used to him. when he was still a mere boy.

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His destination was the ministry,' and for this, knowing how much his father and mother wished it, he tried to prepare himself. He was already conscious, however, that he had not the least enthusiasm for that business, that even grave prohibitory doubts were gradually rising ahead.' It has been supposed that he disliked the formalism of the Scotch Church; but formalism, he says, was not the pinching point, had there been the preliminary of belief forthcoming. 'No church or speaking entity whatever can do without formulas, but it must believe them first if it would be honest.'

Two letters to Carlyle from one of these early friends may be given here as specimens of the rest. They bring back the Annandale of 1814, and show a faint kind of image of Carlyle himself reflected on the writer's mind. His name was Hill. He was about Carlyle's age, and subscribes himself Peter Pindar.

To T. Carlyle.

Castlebank, Jan. 1, 1814. Wind S.W. Weather hazy.

What is the life of man? Is it not to shift from trouble to trouble and from side to side? to button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another? So wrote the celebrated Sterne, so quoted the no less celebrated Jonathan, and so may the poor devil Pindar apply it to himself. You mention some two or three disappointments you have met with lately. For shame, Sir, to be so peevish and