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.

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 me now after fifty-seven years of time! My far-off love and sadness, is that journey to 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, etc.

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."

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, In the classical field [he writes elsewhere] [ and salt butter from the home farm, with am truly as nothing. Homer I learnt to read a few eggs occasionally as a luxury. in the original with difficulty, after Wolf's With their thrifty habits they required no broad flash of light thrown into it; Eschylus other food. In the return cart their linen and Sophocles mainly in translations. Tacitus went back to their mothers to be washed and Virgil became really interesting to me; and mended. Poverty protected them Homer and Eschylus above all; Horace egofrom temptations to vicious amusements. istical, leichtfertig, in sad fact I never cared They formed their economical friend-for; Cicero, after long and various trials, ships; they shared their breakfasts and their thoughts, and had their clubs for

always proved a windy person and a weariness
excellent though misjudging life of him.
to me, extinguished altogether by Middleton's

Brown was

conversation or discussion. When term was over they walked home in parties, It was not much better with philosoeach district having its little knot belong-phy. Dugald Stewart had gone away two ing to it; and, known along the roads as years before Carlyle entered. university scholars, they were assured of the new professor, "an eloquent, acute entertainment on the way. 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.

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, 1809. He was to be fourteen on the fourth of the approaching December. Edinburgh is nearly one hundred miles

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.

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 speci mens 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

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, from trouble to trouble and from side to side? Carlyle himself holding the first place in to button up one cause of vexation and untheir narrow circle. Their lives were button another? So wrote the celebrated pure and simple. Nowhere in these let- Sterne, so quoted the no less celebrated Jonaters is there any jesting with vice, or than, and so may the poor devil Pindar apply light allusions to it. The boys wrote to it to himself. You mention some two or one another on the last novel of Scott or three disappointments you have met with poem of Byron, on the Edinburgh Review, lately. For shame, sir, to be so peevish and on the war, on the fall of Napoleon, occasplenetic! Your disappointments are "trifles sionally on geometrical problems, sertions and disappointments I have experienced. light as air" when compared with the vexamons, college exercises, and divinity lec- I was vexed and grieved to the very soul and tures, and again on innocent trifles, with beyond the soul, to go to Galloway and be sketches, now and then humorous and deprived of the pleasure of something you bright, of Annandale life as it was seventy know nothing about. I was disappointed on years ago. They looked to Carlyle to my return at finding her in a devil of a bad direct their judgment and advise them in shy humor. I was but why do I talk to you difficulties. He was the prudent one of about such things? There are joys and sorthe party, able, if money matters went rows, pleasures and pains, with which a Stoic wrong, to help them out of his humble Platonic humdrum bookworm sort of fellow savings. He was already noted, too, for quently can have no idea of. I was disaplike you, sir, intermeddleth not, and consepower of effective speech- "far too sarpointed in Bonaparte's escaping to Paris when castic for so young a man was what he ought to have been taken prisoner by the elder people said of him. One of his cor- allies at Leipsic. I was disappointed at your respondents addressed him always as not mentioning anything about our old ac"Jonathan," or "Dean," or "Doctor," as quaintances at Edinburgh. Last night there if he was to be a second Swift. Others was a flag on the mail, and to-night when I excalled him Parson, perhaps from his in- pected a Gazette announcing some great victended profession. All foretold future tory, the taking of Bayonne or the marching greatness to him of one kind or another. of Wellington to Bordeaux, I was disapThey recognized that he was not like pointed that the cause of all the rejoicing was other men, that he was superior to other walls of Bayonne, in which we lost upwards of an engagement with the French under the men, in character as well as intellect. five hundred men killed and three thousand Knowing how you abhor all affectation" wounded, and drew off the remainder of our is an expression used to him when he was army safe from the destroying weapons of the still a mere boy. enemy. I was disappointed last Sunday, after His destination was "the ministry," I had got my stockings on, to find that there and for this, knowing how much his father was a hole in the heel of one of them. I read and mother wished it, he tried to prepare a great many books at Kirkton, and was dishimself. He was already conscious, how-appointed at finding faults in almost every one ever, "that he had not the least enthusi- signifies going on at this rate? Unmixed hapof them. I will be disappointed; but what asm for that business, that even grave piness is not the lot of man, 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

"

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.

dean 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 let

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 Hod-ter was good; but allow me to observe that dam 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 Scot. land which followed the close of the war. There were sarcastic sketches, too, of the families with which he was thrown in Annan and the neighborhood. 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."

among all my elegant and respectable correspondents there is none whose manner of letterwriting I so much envy as yours. A happy flow of language either for pathos, description, or humor, and an easy, graceful current of ideas appropriate to every subject, characterize 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 be read and probably applauded by a generadistant, when these our juvenile epistles will tion 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, few knew us, and still fewer took an interest 1814, we were very sentimental: we said that 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 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 tender associations, and will make us forget our college scenes, endeared to us by many 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 splendor 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 spe cially distinguished himself, and had been selected afterwards to manage a school at Haddington, where his success as a teacher had been again conspicuous. I have had the pleasure of receiving, my Among his pupils at Haddington there dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly was one gifted little girl who will be hereletter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shan- | after much heard of in these pages, Jane

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.

Baillie Welsh, daughter of a Dr. Welsh | piece,” for which, however, he had been
whose surgical fame was then great in that complimented "by comrades and profes-
part of Scotland, a remarkable man who sors.' His next was a discourse in Latin
liked Irving and trusted his only child in on the question whether there was or was
his hands. The Haddington adventure not such a thing as "natural religion."
had answered so well that Irving, after a This, too, he says, was
weak enough."
year or two, was removed to a larger It is lost, and nothing is left to show the
school at Kirkcaldy, where, though no view which he took about the matter.
fault was found with his teaching, he gave But here also he gave satisfaction, and
less complete satisfaction. A party was innocently pleased with himself. It
among his patrons there thought him too was on this occasion that he fell in acci-
severe with the boys, thought him proud, dentally with Irving at a friend's rooms in
thought him this or that which they did Edinburgh, and there was a trifling skir-
not like. The dissentients resolved at mish of tongue between them, where Irv
last to have a second school of their own ing found the laugh turned against him.
to be managed in a different fashion, and A few months after came Carlyle's ap-
they applied to the classical and mathe-pointment to Kirkcaldy as Irving's quasi
matical professors at Edinburgh to rec- rival, and perhaps he felt a little uneasy
ommend them a master. Professor as to the terms on which they might
Christieson and Professor Leslie, who
had noticed Carlyle more than he was
aware of, had decided that he was the fit-
test person that they knew of; and in the
summer of 1816 notice of the offered pre-
ferment was sent down to him at Annan.

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
He had seen Irving's face occasionally of the masters in Annan School, to whom
in Ecclefechan Church, and once after- Carlyle was much attached, and whose
wards, when Irving, fresh from his col-portrait he has painted, had just lost his
lege distinctions, had looked in upon An-
nan 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 long, 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."

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 forever ended them by a friendliness which on wider scenes might have been called chivalrous. At first sight he heartily shook my hand, welcomed me as if I had been a valued old acquaintance, almost a brother, and before my leaving came up to me again and with the frankest tone said, "You are coming to Kirkcaldy to look about you in a month or two. You know I am there; my house and all that I can do for you is yours; two Annandale people must not be strangers in Fife." The doubting Thomas durst not quite believe all this, so chivalrous was it, but felt pleased and relieved by the fine and sincere tone of it, and thought to himself, "Well, it would be pretty."

To Kirkcaldy, then, Carlyle went with In the winter of 1815 Carlyle for the hopes so far improved. How Irving kept first time personally met Irving, and the his word; how warmly he received him; beginning of the acquaintance was not how he opened his house, his library, his promising. He was still pursuing his heart to him; how they walked and talked divinity course. Candidates who could together on Kirkcaldy sands on the sumnot attend the regular lectures at the mer nights, and toured together in holiday university came up once a year and deliv- time through the Highlands; how Carlyle ered an address of some kind in the Di- found in him a most precious and affec vinity Hall. One already he had given in tionate companion at the most critical the first year of his Annan mastership- period of his life-all this Carlyle has an English sermon on the text "Before I himself described. The reader will find. was afflicted I went astray,' etc. He it for himself in the reminiscences of Ed. calls it "a weak, flowery, sentimental | ward Irving.