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."

That this struggle, which so shook him to the very centre of his being, had a prejudicial effect on his bodily health, may be granted as a most likely thing; but it is only reasonable to suppose that the vast amount of reading this Scottish Scaliger went through in his boyhood, and which at Edinburgh amazed all the librarians as a phenomenon without parallel in their experience, must have tended to undermine his naturally vigorous constitution. The chronic dyspepsia that was to accompany him henceforth through life was, we may rest assured, not the result of one spiritual conflict confined to a brief period of time; it must have been the gradual work of years. Had he not been gifted with a more than ordinary share of the vitality inherent in his race, it is hardly possible to conceive that a youth, who had been almost constantly reading from his very infancy, and who at nineteen had probably read more books than all the professors in Edinburgh put together, would have survived such a terrible strain, imposed at that period of life when the body, as well as the mind, is in a formative state. "You cannot," he told the Edinburgh students, when he was an old man, "if you are going to do any decisive intellectual operationif you are going to write a book—at least I never could— do it without getting decidedly made ill by it." He had

His Mode of Life in Edinburgh.

59

begun early to realise that fact, when he was crushing the reading of years into months. Nor is it at all unlikely that inattention to diet, perhaps partly the result of limited means, may have had something to do with the physical evil that was to dog his footsteps through all the remaining days of his earthly pilgrimage. Not without significance is the acknowledgment in Sartor, that his upbringing had been "too frugal;" and the impression made by these words is deepened when we find it delicately hinted that "even pecuniary distresses" were not wanting in the lowly home, and that it was in "an atmosphere of Poverty and manifold Chagrin" that the brave young soul struggled onwards. To an American visitor, in 1875, when speaking of his admiration of Goethe, he said that he was filled with an intense desire, when he was a young man, to visit him. "But," he added, "his parents were too poor to send him to Germany, and he received, instead, a few precious letters from the great poet."

This view of the limitations imposed by poverty receives support from one little glimpse, apparently quite authentic, into Carlyle's mode of life while attending the University. It is furnished by a gentleman who, when he published the reminiscence, was one of the representatives of the city of Sydney in the Parliament of New South Wales. "When coming from the West Indies to England, I met on board a Dr Nicholson, who in course of conversation informed me that he was a student with Mr Carlyle at the Edinburgh University, and that they lived together in lodgings, along with another young student, and that the whole three slept in the same bedroom. Dr Nicholson added, that Mr Carlyle took the dux prize in the mathematical class, and that their other bedroom companion

took the second prize; but he observed, that while Mr Carlyle seemed to master the subject without much effort or application, the other lad laboured at his problems with desperate zeal, sometimes sitting up all night at the task. I happened to mention this (about 1869) to Mr Carlyle, who remembered Dr Nicholson well, and described him accurately. He also remembered their residence in Edinburgh; but he said that Dr Nicholson was greatly deceived if he thought he mastered his mathematical difficulties with ease, or that it did not cost him much exertion. He said that he laboured most intensely at the study of mathematics, and that he has gained nothing in this world worth speaking about without the hardest of labour."* The fact that a sharer of his humble lodging could be so much in the dark as to his modes of working, is an indication of the self-contained nature of young Carlyle; and therefore we need not be surprised to find few reminiscences of his student life by personal acquaintances either at Edinburgh or near his father's home, where he spent each of the long summer vacations that extend in the Scottish Universities from April to November. There is but one anecdote of that period of his life which throws much light on his College work. To some congenial friend, most likely his first classical tutor, Mr Johnston, he so far unbosomed himself, on returning to Ecclefechan at the close of a session, as to intimate, with justifiable exultation, that the Principia of Newton were all prostrate at his feet!" He may have been irregular in his application to the work of his

* Observations on the Public Affairs and Public Men of England. By David Buchanan. Sydney: 1871.

His Loneliness in Youth.

61

classes, turning to it only at intervals, and then with desperate energy; but this was a great thing for a youth to be able to say who left the University in his nineteenth year.

It is hardly necessary to add, that Carlyle never entered into the social life of the University. None of its associated societies, formed for the cultivation of oratory, is able to boast that his name stands on its list of members; though the Dialectic, which had been founded in 1787, included at the time more than one fellow-student from his own district of country, and had among the rest Macdiarmid, who became a journalist of note at Dumfries. If he was too young to become connected with these debating clubs, there was a social bar, as well as that of youth, to hinder his admission to the Speculative Society, which had, and probably still has, a standard of gentility to maintain. But even if the door had been open, Carlyle would not have chosen to enter; for the testimony of each of the few contemporaries who had any knowledge of him, goes to show that he was lonely and contemplative in his habits. When his University career had come to a close, we see the solitary youth, already with a stamp of sadness on his countenance that was never to leave it in this life, turning to his native hills. There, free at last from the "neck halter" which had "nigh throttled him, till he broke it off," he will in solitude face the problem that yet remains to be solved.

CHAPTER VII.

BECOMES A SCHOOLMASTER-AT ANNAN AND KIRKCALDY -FRIENDSHIP WITH EDWARD IRVING-A SEVERE DISCIPLINARIAN-INDIGNATION OF THE MOTHERS

CONTEMPLATES EMIGRATING

SECOND EDINBURGH

PERIOD BEGINS HIS LITERARY LIFE.

A NEW plan of life had to be formed, and it was no easy task getting under way. It was, doubtless, only as a tentative that he turned to the occupation of schoolmaster. When he went home to Annandale from the University, or soon thereafter, the post of Mathematical Teacher in the Burgh School of Annan, where he himself had been a pupil, happened to become vacant; and for this he presented himself as a candidate, receiving the appointment after a competitive trial, which is said to have taken place at Dumfries. The young man who had mastered Newton's Principia, and who knew himself to be the superior of his teachers in the Metropolitan University, must have felt the stirrings of a lofty ambition within him. Yet we cannot doubt that he gratefully accepted the work that offered itself, even though it was but that of the pedagogue in an obscure provincial town, yielding small honour in the eye of the world, and, “at best, bread and water wages," as is stated by Teufelsdröckh. Nor, although it is hinted in Sartor that the work "was performed ill, at best unpleasantly," are we inclined to