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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

do in this thoughtless scene. I have my views of life to reform, and the whole plan of my conduct to remodel, withal I have my health to recover; and then once more I shall venture my bark upon the waters of this wide realm, and, if she can not weather it, I shall steer west, and try the waters of another world.' So he reasons and resolves, but, sure, a worthier destiny awaits him than voluntary exile."

And so it proved. By patiently putting his hand to whatever work it found to do, he kept his bark afloat in Scottish waters, and in five or six years gained a safe haven. Between 1820 and 1825 he prepared nearly a score of articles for the "Edinburgh Encyclopædia," among which are biographical sketches of Montaigne, Montesquieu, Necker, Nelson, and the two Pitts, and descriptions of Newfoundland, the Netherlands, and several counties of England. For the "New Edinburgh Review" he wrote critiques upon Joanna Baillie's "Metrical Legends" and Goethe's "Faust, none of which appear in his collected works. He translated Legendre's "Geometry and Trigonometry," to which he added notes and an introductory chapter on "Proportion," which De Morgan says is" a thoughtful and ingenious essay, as good a substitute for the 'Fifth book of Euclid' as could be given in the space." He translated Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," and furnished to the "London Magazine" a series of papers

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which were afterward expanded into the "Life of Schiller."

He also was for a time private tutor to Charles Buller, a young man of fortune, who became one of the most promising statesmen of the day, and of whom Carlyle many years after wrote a graceful obituary. His last piece of task-work was a series of translations of tales from Goethe, Richter, Tieck, Musäus, and Hoffmann, of which only a portion appear in his collected works. Of these he says, "This book of translations was not of my suggestion or desiring, but of my executing as honest journey-work, in defect of better."

The "Life of Schiller" is the earliest of Carlyle's works with which we are familiar. We believe (although we are not quite sure) that the magazine papers were first collected into a volume in 1827 in America, under the editorial care of Charles Follen, who furnished a highly laudatory preface, and corrected some of the translations. The name of the author was not given. It must be borne in mind that fifty and odd years ago, when these papers first appeared, it was scarcely. dreamed in England that such a thing as German literature existed. One might probably count up on his fingers every English man of letters who could read with any tolerable ease a page of Goethe, Schiller, or Wieland and scarcely anything was known of their writings through translations. Carlyle says: "Coleridge's translation of

'Wallenstein' is as a whole unknown to me; but judging from many large specimens, I should pronounce it, except Sotheby's Oberon,' to be the best, and indeed the only sufferable, translation from the German with which our literature has yet been enriched." Of Carlyle's poetical translations we can not speak in very high terms. Indeed, his poetical appreciation was by no means of a high order. There is much of truth in what Margaret Fuller wrote of him: "For the higher kind of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd."

Carlyle indeed admitted the "Life of Schiller" into his own collected edition of his works, but with a half protest, much as Macaulay did with his early paper on Milton. It is a respectable, but by no means a great work. It is chiefly noteworthy from the fact that its style bears no trace of the peculiarities which mark most of his subsequent writings. There is rarely any attempt to rise into eloquence or enthusiasm. The closing paragraph, however, is as noble as anything ever written by him. After speaking of the perpetual ill-health of Schiller, and the manifold other ills under which he labored all his life, the biography concludes:

SCHILLER'S CAREER.

"Yet, on the whole, we may pronounce him happy. His days passed in the contemplation of ideal grandeur,

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