sarily anxious about him, rendered what help they could. Once more the Ecclefechan carrier brought up the weekly or monthly supplies of oatmeal, cakes, butter, and, when needed, under-garments, returning with the dirty linen for the mother to wash and mend, and occasional presents which were never forgotten; while Carlyle, after a thought of civil engineering, for which his mathematical training gave him a passing inclination, sate down seriously, if not very assiduously, to study law. Letters to and from Ecclefechan were constant, the carrier acting as postman. Selections from them bring the scene and characters before the reader's eyes. Sister Mary, then twelve years old, writes: I take the opportunity of sending you this scrawl. I got the hat you sent with Sandy [brother Alexander], and it fits very well. It was far too good; a worse would have done very well. Boys and I are employed this winter in waiting on the cattle, and are going on very well at present. I generally write a copy every night, and read a little in the Cottagers of Glenburnie, or some such like; and it shall be my earnest desire never to imitate the abominable slutteries of Mrs. Maclarly. The remarks of the author, Mrs. Hamilton, often bring your neat ways in my mind, and I hope to be benefited by them. In the mean time, I shall endeavour to be a good girl, to be kind and obedient to my parents, and obliging to my brothers and sisters. You will write me a long letter when the carrier comes back. The mother was unwearied in her affectionate solicitude-solicitude for the eternal as well as temporal interests of her darling child. Mrs. Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle. Mainhill, January 3, 1819. Dear Son, I received yours in due time, and was glad to hear you were well. I hope you will be healthier, moving about in the city, than in your former way. Health is a valuable privilege; try to improve it, then. The time is short. Another year has commenced. Time is on the wing, and flies swiftly. Seek God with all your heart; and oh, my dear son, cease not to pray for His counsel in all your ways. Fear not the world; you will be provided for as He sees meet for you. As a sincere friend, whom you are always dear to, I beg you do not neglect reading a part of your Bible daily, and may the Lord open your eyes to see wondrous things out of His law! But it is now two o'clock in the morning, and a bad pen, bad ink, and I as bad at writing. I will drop it, and add no more, but remain Your loving mother, PEGGIE CARLYLE. Carlyle had written a sermon on the salutary effects of 'affliction,' as his first exercise in the Divinity School. He was beginning now, in addition to the problem of living which he had to solve, to learn what affliction meant. He was attacked with dyspepsia, which never wholly left him, and in these early years soon assumed its most torturing form like a rat gnawing at the pit of his stomach;' his natural irritability found escape in expressions which showed that he was already attaining a mastery of language. The noises of Edinburgh drove him wild and opened the sluices of his denunciatory eloquence. 6 I find living here very high (he wrote soon after he was settled in his lodgings). An hour ago I paid my week's bill, which, though 15s. 2d., was the smallest of the three I have yet discharged. This is an unreasonable sum when I consider the slender accommodation and the paltry, ill-cooked morsel which is my daily pittance. There is also a schoolmaster right overhead, whose noisy brats give me at times no small annoyance. On a given night of the week he also assembles a select number of vocal performers, whose music, as they charitably name it, is now and then so clamorous that I almost wished the throats of these sweet singers full of molten lead, or any other substance that would stop their braying. But he was not losing heart, and he liked, so far as he had seen into it, his new profession. The law (he told his mother) is what I sometimes think I was intended for naturally. I am afraid it takes several hundreds to become an advocate. But for this I should commence the study of it with great hopes of success. We shall see whether it is possible. One of the first advocates of the day raised himself from being a disconsolate preacher to his present eminence. Therefore I entreat you not to be uneasy about me. I see none of my fellows with whom I am very anxious to change places. Tell the boys not to let their hearts be troubled for me. I am a stubborn dog, and evil fortune shall not break my heart or bend it either, as I hope. I know not how to speak about the washing which you offer so kindly. Surely you thought, five years ago, that this troublesome washing and baking was all over; and now to recommence! I can scarcely think of troubling you; yet the clothes are ill-washed here; and if the box be going and coming any way, perhaps you can manage it.' While law lectures were being attended, the problem was to live. Pupils were a poor resource, and of his adventures in this department Carlyle gave ridiculous accounts. In February, 1819, he wrote to his brother John:— About a week ago I briefly dismissed an hour of private teaching. A man in the New Town applied to one Nichol, public teacher of mathematics here, for a person to give instruction in arithmetic, or something of that sort. Nichol spoke of me, and I was in consequence directed to call on the man next morning. I went at the appointed hour, and after waiting for a few minutes was met by a stout, impudent-looking man with red whiskers, having much the air of an attorney, or some such creature of that sort. As our conversation may give you some insight into these matters, I report the substance of it. 'I am here,' I said, after making a slight bow, which was just perceptibly returned, 'by the request of Mr. Nichol, to speak with you, sir, about a mathematical teacher whom he tells me you want.' 'Aye. What are your terms?' 'Two guineas a month for each hour.' 'Two guineas a month! that is perfectly extravagant.' 'I believe it to be the rate at which every teacher of respectability in Edinburgh officiates, and I know it to be the rate below which I never officiate.' 'That will not do for my friend.' 'I am sorry that nothing else will do for me;' and I retired with considerable deliberation. Other attempts were not so unsuccessful; one, sometimes two, pupils were found willing to pay at the rate required. Dr. Brewster, afterwards Sir David, discovered Carlyle and gave him employment on his Encyclopædia. He was thus able to earn, as long as the session lasted, about two pounds a week, and on this he contrived to live without trenching on his capital. His chief pleasure was his correspondence with his mother, which never slackened. She had written to tell him of the death of her sister Mary. He replies : Edinburgh, Monday, March 29, 1819. My dear Mother, I am so much obliged to you for the affectionate concern which you express for me in that long letter that I cannot delay to send you a few brief words by way of reply. I was affected by the short notice you give me of Aunt Mary's death, and the short reflections with which you close it. It is true, my dear mother, 'that we must all soon follow her,' such is the unalterable and not unpleasing doom of men. Then it is well for those who, at that awful moment which is before every one, shall be able to look back with calmness and forward with hope. But I need not dwell upon this solemn subject. It is familiar to the thoughts of every one who has any thought. I am rather afraid I have not been quite regular in reading that best of books which you recommended to me. However, last night I was reading upon my favourite Job, and I hope to do better in time to come. I entreat you to believe that I am sincerely desirous of being a good man; and though we may differ in some few unimportant particulars, yet I firmly trust that the same power which created us with imperfect faculties will pardon the errors of every one (and none are without them) who seeks truth and righteousness with a simple heart. You need not fear my studying too much. In fact, my prospects are so unsettled that I do not often sit down to books with all the zeal I am capable of. You are not to think I am fretful. I have long accustomed my mind to look upon the future with a sedate aspect, and at any rate my hopes have never yet failed me. A French author, d'Alembert (one of the few persons who deserve the honourable epithet of honest man), whom I was lately reading, remarks that one who devoted his life to learning ought to carry for his motto, Liberty, Truth, Poverty,' for he that fears the latter can never have the former. This should not prevent one from using every honest effort to attain a comfortable situation in life; it says only that the best is dearly bought by base conduct, and the worst is not worth mourning over. We shall speak of all these matters more fully in summer, for I am meditating just now to come down to stay a while with you, accompanied with a cargo of books, Italian, German, and others. You will give me yonder little room, and you will waken me every morning about five or six o'clock. Then such study. I shall delve in the garden too, and, in a word, become not only the wisest but the strongest man in those regions. This is all claver, but it pleases one. My dear mother, yours most affectionately, D'Alembert's name had probably never reached Annandale, and Mrs. Carlyle could not gather from it into what perilous regions her son was travelling-but her quick ear caught something in the tone which frightened her. Oh, my dear, dear son (she answered at once and eagerly), I would pray for a blessing on your learning. I beg you with all the feeling of an affectionate mother that you would study the Word of God, which He has graciously put in our hands, that it may powerfully reach our hearts, that we may discern it in its true light. God made man after His own image, therefore he behoved to be without any imperfect faculties. Beware, my dear son, of such thoughts; let them not dwell on your mind. God forbid! But I dare say you will not care to read this scrawl. Do make religion your great study, Tom; if you repent it, I will bear the blame for ever. Carlyle was thinking as much as his mother of religion, but the form in which his thoughts were running was not hers. He was painfully seeing that all things were not wholly as he had been taught to think of them; the doubts which had stopped his divinity career were blackening into thunder-clouds; and all his reflections were coloured by dyspepsia. I was entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles,' he says, 'solitary, eating my own heart, fast losing my health too, a prey to nameless struggles and miseries, which have yet a kind of horror in them to my thoughts, three weeks without any kind of sleep from impossibility to be free of noise.' In fact he was entering on what he called 'the three most miserable years of my life.' He would have been saved from much could he have resolutely thrown himself into his intended profession; but he hated it, as just then, perhaps, he would have hated anything. I had thought (he writes in a note somewhere) of attempting to become an advocate. It seemed glorious to me for its independency, and I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as wages for all that bogpool of disgust. Hume's lectures once done with, I flung the thing away for ever. Men who are out of humour with themselves see their condition reflected in the world outside them, and everything seems amiss because it is not well with themselves. But the state of Scotland and England also was fitted to feed his discontent. The great war had been followed by a collapse. Wages were low, food at famine prices. Tens of thousands of artisans were out of work, their families were starving, and they themselves were growing mutinous. Even at home from his own sternly patient father, who never meddled with politics, he heard things not calculated to reconcile him to existing arrangements. I have heard my father say (he mentions), with an impressiveness which all his perceptions carried with them, that the lot of a poor man was growing worse, that the world would not, and could not, last as it was, but mighty changes, of which none saw the end, were on the way. In the dear years when the oatmeal was as high as ten shillings a stone, he had noticed the labourers, I have heard him tell, retire each separately to a brook and there drink instead of dining, anxious only to hide it. These early impressions can be traced through the whole of Carlyle's writings, the conviction being forced upon him that there was something vicious to the bottom in English and Scotch society, and that revolution in some form or other lay visibly ahead. So long as Irving remained in Edinburgh the condition of the people' question was the constant subject of talk between him and Carlyle. They were both of them ardent, radical, indignant at the injustice which they witnessed, and as yet unconscious of the difficulty of mending 6 it. Irving, however, Carlyle had seen little of since they had moved to Edinburgh, and he was left, for the most part, alone with his own thoughts. There had come upon him the trial which in these days awaits every man of high intellectual gifts and noble nature on his first actual acquaintance with human things-the question, far deeper than any mere political one, What is this world then, what is this human life, over which a just God is said to preside, but of whose presence or whose providence so few signs are visible? In happier ages religion silences scepticism if it cannot reply to its difficulties, and postpones the solution of the mystery to another stage of existence. Brought up in a pious family where religion was not talked about or emotionalised, but was accepted as the rule of thought and conduct, himself too instinctively upright, pure of heart, and reverent, Carlyle, like his parents, had accepted the Bible as a direct communication from Heaven. It made known the will of God, and the relations in which man stood to his Maker, as a present fact, the truth of it, like the truth of gravitation, which man must act upon or immediately suffer the consequences. But religion, as revealed in the Bible, passes beyond present conduct, penetrates all forms of thought, and takes possession wherever it goes. It claims to control the intellect, to explain the past and foretell the future. It has entered into poetry and art, and has been the interpreter of history. And thus there had grown round it a body of opinion on all varieties of subjects assumed to be authoritative; dogmas which science was contradicting; a history of events which it called infallible, yet which the canons of evidence, by which other histories are tried and tested successfully, declared not to be infallible at all. In the Mainhill household the Westminster Confession was a full and complete account of the position of mankind and of the Being to whom they owed their existence. For Carlyle's father and mother this Old and New Testament not only contained all spiritual truth necessary for guidance in word and deed, but every fact related in them was literally true. To doubt was not to mistake, but was to commit a sin of the deepest dye, and was a sure sign of a corrupted heart. His own wide study of modern literature had shown him that much of this had appeared to many of the strongest minds in Europe to be doubtful or even plainly incredible. Young men of genius are the first to feel the growing influences of their time, and on Carlyle they fell in their most painful form. With his pride, he was most modest and self-distrustful. He had been taught that want of faith was sin, yet, like a true Scot, he knew that he would peril his soul if he pretended to believe what his intellect told him was false. If any part of what was called Revelation was mistaken, how could he be assured of the rest? How could he tell that the moral part of it, to which the phenomena which he saw round him were in plain contradiction, was more than a devout imagination'? Thus in the 6 |