&c. &c. The production of these embrace a period of literary labour commencing in 1823 and coming down to 1860-thirtyseven years. In 1840 Mr. Carlyle delivered a series of lectures on "Hero Worship," afterwards published. He married about 1827, and resided in Scotland (near Dumfries) until 1830, when he took up his residence permanently in London. He has been an honest worker at his craft, and an inveterate exposer of "shams." His style of composition has been the subject of some difference of opinion, many accusing him of an affected ruggedness amounting to Americanism. It is clearly not the style approved of by those who hold to the pure and polished diction of Addison and his contemporaries as models for the study of elegant and thoroughly English prose. Still his force and power is undeniable, though his cutting satire has often caused him to be (and very undeservedly so) regarded as a cynic. His detractors not less than his admirers must agree upon one point, that Thomas Carlyle is one of the foremost spirits of the age.]

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I WILL endeavour to say nothing that is not true as far as I can manage, and that is pretty much all that I can engage for. Advices, I believe, to young men-and to all men-are very seldom much valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether. I would not, therefore, much into advising; but there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the summary of all advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I daresay; but I must nevertheless let you hear it the thousand and first time, for it is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or not-namely, that above all things the interest of your own life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day, in this place where you have come to get education. Diligent! That includes all virtues in it that a student can have; I mean to include it in all qualities that lead into the acquirement of real instruction and improvement in such a place. If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life, in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at indeed little; while in the course of years, when you

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to look back, and if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers—and among many counsellers there is wisdom-you will bitterly repent when it is too late. The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed to go on to the last. By diligence I mean among other thingsand very

chiefly-honesty in all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavour to do that. Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really come to know in your own minds and what is still unknown. Leave all that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with intelligence.

There is such a thing as a man endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does not know more than the outside skin of them; and he goes flourishing about with them. Avoid all that is entirely unworthy of an honourable habit. Be modest, and humble, and diligent in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the right way, so far as they have been able to understand it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of all problems for a man to

find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. In fact, morality as regards study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything real; and it would be greatly better if he were tied up from doing any such thing. He does nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters. That is a very old doctrine, but a very true one; and you will find it confirmed by all the thinking men that have ever lived in this long series of generations of which we are the latest.

I daresay you know, very many of you, that it is now seven hundred years since Universities were first set up in this Europe of ours. Abelard and other people had risen up with doctrines in them the people wished to hear of, and students flocked towards them from all parts of the world. There was no getting the thing recorded in books as you may now. You had to hear him speaking to you vocally, or else you could not learn at all what it was that he wanted to say. And so they gathered together the various people who had anything to teach, and formed themselves gradually, under the patronage of kings and other potentates who were anxious about the culture of their populations, nobly anxious for their benefit, and became a University.

I daresay, perhaps, you have heard it said that all that is greatly altered by the invention of printing, which took place about midway between us and the origin of Universities. A man has not now to go away to where a professor is actually speaking, because in most cases he can get his doctrine out of him through a book, and can read it, and read it again and again, and study it. I don't know that I know of any way which the whole facts of a subject may be more completely taken in, if our studies are moulded in conformity with it. Nevertheless, Universities have, and will continue to have, an indispensable value in society -a very high value. I consider the very highest interests of man vitally intrusted to them.

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It remains, however, a very curious truth, what has been said by observant people, that the main use of the Universities in the present age is that, after you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a collection of books, a great library of good books, which you proceed to study and to read. What the Universities have mainly done--what I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading; and learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.

The most unhappy of all men is the man that cannot tell what he is going to do, that has got no work cut out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind-honest work, which you intend getting done. If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice-perhaps the best you could get -is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book. It is analogous to what doctors tell us about the physical health and appetites of the patient. You must learn to distinguish between false appetite and real. There is such a thing as a false appetite, which will lead a man into vagaries with regard to diet, will tempt him to eat spicy things which he should not eat at all, and would not but that it is toothsome, and for the moment in baseness of mind. A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has appetite for-what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have

in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to go into history-to inquire into what has passed before you in the families of men. The history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all concern you; and you will find that all the knowledge you have got will be extremely applicable to elucidate that.

Our own history of England, which you will take a great deal of natural pains to make yourselves acquainted with, you will find, beyond all others, worthy of your study; because I believe that the British nation produced a finer set of men than any you will find it possible to get anywhere else in the world.

Upon the whole, I do not think that, in general, out of common history books, you will ever get into the real history of this country, or anything particular which it would beseem you to know. You may read very ingenious and very clever books by men whom it would be the height of insolence in me to do any other thing than express my respect for. But their position is essentially sceptical. Man is unhappily in that condition that he will make only a temporary explanation of anything, and you will not be able, if you are like the man, to understand how this island came to be what it is. You will not find it recorded in books. You will find recorded in books a jumble of tumults, disastrous ineptitudes, and all that kind of thing. But to get what you want you will have to look into side sources, and inquire in all directions.

One remark more about your reading. I do not know whether it has been sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books. When a man is reading on any kind of subject, in most departments of books-in all books, if you take it in a wide sense -you will find that there is a division of good books and bad books there is a good kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume that you are