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, 1809. 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-sevenyears 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 ther 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.

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

splenetic! Your disappointments are 'trifles light as air' when compared with the vexations and disappointments I have experienced. I was vexed and grieved to the very soul and beyond the soul, to go to Galloway and be deprived of the pleasure of something you know nothing about. I was disappointed on my return at finding her in a devil of a bad shy humour. I was—but why do I talk to you about such things? There are joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, with which a Stoic Platonic humdrum bookworm sort of fellow like you, Sir, intermeddleth not, and consequently can have no idea of. I was disappointed in Bonaparte's escaping to Paris when he ought to have been taken prisoner by the allies at Leipsic. I was disappointed at your not mentioning anything about our old acquaintances at Edinburgh. Last night there was a flag on the mail, and to-night when I expected a Gazette announcing some great victory, the taking of Bayonne or the marching of Wellington to Bourdeaux, I was disappointed that the cause of all the rejoicing was an engagement with the French under the walls of Bayonne, in which we lost upwards of 500 men killed and 3,000 wounded, and drew off the remainder of our army safe from the destroying weapons of the enemy. I was disappointed last Sunday, after I had got my stockings on, to find that there was a hole in the heel of one of them. I read a great many books at Kirkton, and was disappointed at finding faults in almost every one of them. I will be disappointed; but what signifies going on at this rate? Unmixed happiness is not the lot of

man

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.

Dear Doctor, I received yours last night, and a scurrilous, blackguarding, flattering, vexing, pernicked, humorous, witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer it piecemeal as a certain Honourable House does a speech from its Sovereign, by echoing back each syllable? No. This won't do. Oh! how I envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an offhand way, ever varying the scene with wit and mirth, while honest Peter must hold on in one numskull track to all eternity pursuing the even tenour of his way, so that one of Peter's letters is as good as a thousand.

You seem to take a friendly concern in my affaires de cœur. By the bye, now, Jonathan, without telling you any particulars of my situation in these matters, which is scarcely known to myself, can't I advise you to fall in love? Granting as I do that it is attended with sorrows, still, Doctor, these are amply compensated by the tendency that this tender passion has to ameliorate the heart, 'provided always, and be it further enacted,' that, chaste as Don Quixote or Don Quixote's horse, your heart never breathes a wish that angels may not register. Only have care of this, Dean, and fall in love as soon as you can-you will be the better for it.

Pages follow of excellent criticism from Peter on Leyden's poems, on the Duke of Wellington, Miss Porter, &c. Carlyle has told him that he was looking for a subject for an epic poem. Peter gives him a tragi-comic description of a wedding at Middlebie, with the return home in a tempest, which he thinks will answer; and concludes :

:

Your reflections on the fall of Napoleon bring to my mind an observation of a friend of mine the other day. I was repeating these lines in Shakespeare and applying them to Bony

1

'But yesterday the word of Cæsar might

Have stood against the world; now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.'

'Aye, very true,' quoth he; the fallow could na be content wi' maist all Europe, and now he's glad o' Elba room.'

Now, Doctor, let me repeat my instructions to you in a few words. Write immediately a very long letter; write an epic poem as soon as may be. Send me some more remarks.' Tell me how you are, how you are spending your time in Edinburgh. Fall in love as soon as you can meet with a proper object. Ever be a friend to Pindar, and thou shalt always find one in the heart-subdued, not subduing

PETER.

In default of writings of his own, none of which survive out of this early period, such lineaments of Carlyle as appear through these letters are not without instructiveness.

Having finished his college course, Carlyle looked out for pupils to maintain himself. The ministry was still his formal destination, but several years had still to elapse before a final resolution would be necessary-four years if he remained in Edinburgh attending lectures in the Divinity Hall; six if he preferred to be a rural Divinity student, presenting himself once in every twelve months at the University and reading a discourse. He did not wish to hasten matters, and, the pupil business being precarious and the mathematical tutorship at Annan falling vacant, Carlyle offered for it and was elected by competition in 1814. He never liked teaching. The recommendation of the place was the sixty or seventy pounds a year of salary, which relieved his father of further expense upon him, and enabled him to put by a little money every year, to be of use in future either to himself or his family. In other respects the life at Annan was only disagreeable to him. His tutor's work he did scrupulously well, but the society of a country town had no interest for him. He would not visit. He lived alone, shutting himself up with his books, disliked the business more and more, and came finally to hate it. Annan had indeed but one recommendation--that he was within reach of his family, especially of his mother, to whom he was attached with a real passion.

His father had by this time given up business at Ecclefechan, and had taken a farm in the neighbourhood. The Great North Road which runs through the village rises gradually into an upland treeless grass country. About two miles distant on the left-hand side as you go towards Lockerby, there stands, about three hundred yards in from the road, a solitary low white-washed house, with a few poor outbuildings attached to it. This is Mainhill, which was now for many years to be Carlyle's home, where he first learned German, studied Faust in a dry ditch, and completed his translation of Wilhelm Meister. The house