His Views on Female Physicians. ΙΟΙ in this passage found utterance on some other occasions in forms that were quaintly humorous-as, for example, was addressed to Mr Robert Lawson, a medical student at Edinburgh, in answer to a request that Mr Carlyle would state his opinion on the subject of the admission of female medical students to the classes in the University and the clinical teaching in the Infirmary-a question which had raised a furious controversy, then at its height. "It is with reluctance," replied Carlyle, "that I write anything to you on this subject of Female Emancipation, which is now rising to such a height; and I do it only on the strict condition that whatever I say shall be private, and nothing of it get into the Newspapers. The truth is, the topic for five-and-twenty years past, especially for the last three or four, has been a mere sorrow to me; one of the most afflicting proofs of the miserable anarchy that prevails in human society; and I have avoided thinking of it, except when fairly compelled; what little has become clear to me on it I will now endeavour to tell you." After laying down the principle that woman's true function is that of wifehood, he continues :-" It seems furthermore indubitable that if a woman miss this destiny, or have renounced it, she has every right, before God and man, to take up whatever honest employment she can find open to her in the world; probably there are several or many employments, now exclusively in the hands of men, for which women might be more or less fit ;-printing, tailoring, weaving, clerking, etc., etc. That Medicine is intrinsically not unfit for them is proved from the fact that in much more sound and earnest ages than ours, before the Medical Profession rose into being, they were virtually the Physicians and Surgeons as well as Sick-nurses, all that the world had. Their form of intellect, their sympathy, their wonderful acuteness of observation, etc., seem to indicate in them peculiar qualities for dealing with disease; and evidently in certain departments (that of female diseases) they have quite peculiar opportunities of being useful. My answer to your question, then, may be that two things are not doubtful to me in this matter. Ist, That Women, any Woman who deliberately so determines, have a right to study Medicine; and that it might be profitable and serviceable to have facilities, or at least possibilities, offered them for so doing. 2d, That, for obvious reasons, Female Students of Medicine ought to have, if possible, Female Teachers, or else an extremely select kind of men; and in particular that to have young women present among young men in Anatomical Classes, Clinical Lectures, or But, in that chivalrous defence of what all other biographers had considered the crowning blunder of Dr Johnson's life. Carlyle could see no matter for ridicule in the marriage with the good Widow Porter, even though she was old enough to be the Doctor's mother. Rather in her love and pity for Johnson, and in his love and gratitude, he saw something that was most pathetic and sacred: "Johnson's deathless affection for his Tetty was," he declares, "always venerable and noble." Well might the husband of Jane Welsh regard as sacred that institute of marriage which had worked so well for him! generally studying Medicine in concert, is an incongruity of the first magnitude, and shocking to think of to every pure and modest mind. This is all I have to say, and I send it to you, under the condition above mentioned, as a Friend for the use of Friends." CHAPTER X. IN HIS MOORLAND HOME-THE LIFE AT CRAIGENPUTTOCH -LETTERS TO GOETHE, DE QUINCEY, AND CHRISTOPHER NORTH-PROPOSED BOG SCHOOL" OF PHILO 66 SOPHERS-EARLY PILGRIMS-WRITES THE MISCEL- THERE is a story of Carlyle's boy-days, told us by a friend who spent his youthful years in the same neighbourhood, which may be mythical, but ought to be true, since it certainly answers to all that we know of the character and circumstances of the persons concerned. According to this local tradition, little Thomas had built in a retired nook of his father's farm a kind of hut for himself to study in; but as his father preferred that he should go to work instead of devoting himself exclusively to his "buiks," he sent the Laird (Mr Sharpe of Hoddam),* who happened to be calling, to order the boy to remove his hut off the ground. But the boy rose to the occasion, slammed the door on the Laird's face, and took himself to his literary studies, careless of the consequences. The * Of the same line to which Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, called by Scott "the Scottish Horace Walpole," belonged, and which is now extinct. Matthew Sharpe of Hoddam was the friend and correspondent of David Hume; perhaps it was he who went to evict "oor Tam" from the Hut. If not, it must have been his successor. resolute character of James Carlyle's eldest son has thus far carried him on in the path which he had so early marked out for himself; but it has been a path beset by obstacles, and wherein there has hung over him at every moment the threat of eviction. Now at length the difficulties have been removed out of the way. The little boy of the hut threatened by Sharpe of Hoddam is at length himself a Laird, free to fashion his own life, so far as that is possible for mortal. His wife's dowry, sufficient if not large, has delivered the struggling son of the peasant-farmer from the necessity of earning his bread. The days of compulsory drudgery, with birch-rod among the urchins in the school and at hack-work for the publishers, are happily ended; and he may at last shape his course in a manner consistent with his sense of personal dignity and the most efficient use of the powers with which he has been endowed. He had already tasted the sweets of London life. "Under its ink-sea of vapour, black, thick, and multifarious as Spartan broth," he had in 1824 renewed his intercourse with Edward Irving, and met for the first time some men of note whom he was to know better in the coming years. As he had remembered so vividly certain features in the main street of Annan that met his curious gaze that morning he entered it for the first time, as a child of eight, so were there images in his mind that he had carried away with him from his first sojourn in the metropolis; and twenty-six years afterwards, when he sat down to write the Life of John Sterling, one of these that came back with special force was the spectacle of the Spanish Refugees, "the Trocadero swarm, thrown off in 1823," who, to the number of Removal to Craigenputtoch. 105 fifty or a hundred, perambulated, "mostly with closed lips, the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St Pancras' new Church." Charles Buller's Scotch tutor must have marked them well; and the fact that he saw them will preserve their memory. "Old steel-grey heads, many of them; the shaggy, thick, blueblack hair of others struck you; their brown complexion, dusky look of suppressed fire, in general their tragic condition as of caged Numidian lions.” That and many another strange sight had the young Caledonian seen in London streets, not without deep interest, as his life-like etchings attest; men of intellect, also, he had met-John Stuart Mill, we believe, amongst the number. But, in the mean time, he did not think of settling in London, great as its attractions were to the man fired by literary ambition. For a little while, after his marriage, he seems to have resided at Comely Bank, in the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh, within easy reach of the libraries and publishers, and enjoying the society (which even the leaders of London life might have envied him) of such neighbours as De Quincey and Sir William Hamilton. At this time he was completing those translations from the German which William Tait published in 1827. In 1828, the young couple resolved to fix their abode on their own property, and accordingly betook themselves to Craigenputtoch, a farm lying in a wild solitude on the southern shore of Loch Urr, among the granite hills of Nithsdale. Out of the world in one sense; yet, after all, not so many miles from Burns's Ellisland, on the silver Nith, only fifteen miles from the town of Dumfries, and even within a comparatively manageable distance (about a day's journey on foot) from Carlyle's native |