Edinburgh sketches & memories

by David Masson

PART II.—1818–1822

From the year 1818, when Carlyle was two-and-twenty years of age, the Church of Scotland had lost the chance of seeing him among her clergy. In his Reminiscences he speaks of his dropping off as but the natural, and in a manner accidental, termination of the languid, half-willing, half-reluctant, state of mind in which he had himself always been on that subject of his clerical calling which his parents had so much at heart. There can be little doubt, however, that stronger forces were at work.

In Kirkcaldy he had been reading omnivorously, not only laying Irving’s library under contribution, but getting over books from the Edinburgh University library as well. Bailly’s Histoire de l’Astronomie was one of those received from Edinburgh; and among those from Irving’s library he mentions “Gibbon, Hume, etc.,” besides a number of the French classics in the small Didot edition. He dwells on his reading of Gibbon, informing us that he read the book with “greedy velocity,” getting through a volume a day, so as to finish the twelve volumes of which Irving’s copy consisted in just as many days. He adds:—“It was, of all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I do now; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirably potent and illuminative to me.” In one of the most intimate conversations I ever had with Carlyle he spoke even more distinctly of this his first complete reading of Gibbon in Kirkcaldy. The conversation was in his back-garden in Chelsea, and the occasion was his having been reading Gibbon, or portions of him, again. After mentioning, rather pathetically, as he does in his Reminiscences, his wonder at the velocity of his reading in his early days as compared with the slow rate at which he could now get through a book, he spoke of Gibbon himself in some detail, and told me that it was from that first well-remembered reading of Gibbon in twelve days, at the rate of a volume a day, that he dated the extirpation from his mind of the last remnant that had been left in it of the orthodox belief in miracles. This is literally what he said, and it is of consequence in our present connection. The process of extirpation can hardly have been complete at the moment of the call on Dr. Ritchie,—else the call would not have been made; but there can be no doubt that it was not mere continued languor that stopped Carlyle in his clerical career. There were the beginnings in his mind of the crash of that system of belief on which the Scottish Church rested, and some adherence to which was imperative on any one who would be a clergyman of that Church in any section of it then recognised or possible.

Although he kept that matter for the present to himself, not admitting even Irving yet to his confidence, the fact that he had given up the clerical career was known at once to all his friends.[^[17]] It was a sore disappointment, above all, to his parents; but they left him to his own course, his father with admirable magnanimity, his mother “perhaps still more lovingly, though not so silently.”

It was another disappointment to them, about the same time, to know that he had resolved to quit the Kirkcaldy schoolmastership. His relations with the Kirkcaldy people, or with some of them, had not been absolutely satisfactory, any more than Irving’s; both had “got tired of schoolmastering and its mean contradictions and poor results,” and had even come to the conclusion “Better die than be a schoolmaster for one’s living”; and in the end of 1818 they had both thrown up their Kirkcaldy engagements and were back in Edinburgh to look about for something else. Irving, then twenty-six years of age and comparatively at ease in the matter of pecuniary means, had preachings here and there about Edinburgh to occupy him, and the possibility of a call to some parish-charge at home, or heroic mission abroad, for his prospect. Carlyle, just twenty-three years of age, was all at sea as to his future, but had about £90 of savings on which to rest till he could see light.

The six months or so from December 1818 to the summer of 1819 form a little period by itself in the Edinburgh lives of Irving and Carlyle. They lodged in the Old Town, not far from each other. Carlyle’s rooms were at No. 15 Carnegie Street, in the suburb called “The Pleasance”; Irving’s, which were the more expensive, were in Bristo Street, close to the University,—where, says Carlyle, he “used to give breakfasts to intellectualities he fell in with, I often a guest with them.” Irving also renewed his connection with the University by attending Hope’s Class of Chemistry, which was always in those days the most crowded of the classes by far, and the Natural History Class under Jameson. I find no proof of any similar attendance on any University Class by Carlyle through the session 1818–19; but we learn from Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving that he was for this session a member of a certain Philosophical Association which Irving had started “for the mutual improvement of those who had already completed the ordinary academic course.” It was one of those small and ephemeral societies of which there have been so many in the history of the University, distinct from the larger and more famous societies,—such as the Speculative, the Theological, the Dialectic, and the Diagnostic,—which established themselves permanently, and still exist. We hear a little of Irving’s doings in the semi-academic brotherhood, especially of an essay which he read to them; but of Carlyle’s doings, if there were any, we hear nothing. The mere membership, however, was a kind of continued bond between him and his Alma Mater through that session; and we can imagine also some renewed intercourse with Professor Leslie, and an occasional dropping in, as an outsider, at one or other of the class-rooms, to hear a stray lecture. Meanwhile, he found no occupation. Irving, besides his preachings, had an hour or two a day of private mathematical teaching, at the rate of two guineas a month per hour; but nothing of the sort came to Carlyle. Once, indeed, recommended by Nichol, the mathematical schoolmaster of whom we have already heard, he did call on a gentleman who wanted mathematical coaching for some friend; but the result was that the gentleman,—whom he describes in the letter as “a stout, impudent-looking man with red whiskers,”—thought two guineas a month “perfectly extravagant,” and would not engage him. In these circumstances, and as his weekly bills for his lodgings and board amounted to between 15s. and 17s.,—which he thought unreasonable for his paltry accommodations, with badly-cooked food, and perpetual disturbance from the noises of a school overhead,—he resolved to leave Edinburgh, for a time at least, and return to his father’s farmhouse at Mainhill.

On the 29th of March 1819 he intimated this intention in a letter to his mother thus:—“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 has devoted his life to learning ought to carry for his motto ‘Liberty, Truth, Poverty,’ for he who fears the latter can never have the former. This should not prevent one from using every honest effort to attain to 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.”[^[18]]

It seems to have been about June 1819 that the migration from Edinburgh to Mainhill was carried into effect. It is thus mentioned in one of Irving’s letters from Bristo Street to the Martins of Kirkcaldy:—“Carlyle goes away to-morrow, and Brown the next day. So here I am once more on my own resources, except Dickson, who is better fitted to swell the enjoyment of a joyous than to cheer the solitude of a lonely hour. For this Carlyle is better fitted than any one I know. It is very odd indeed that he should be sent for want of employment to the country. Of course, like every man of talent, he has gathered around this Patmos many a splendid purpose to be fulfilled, and much improvement to be wrought out. ‘I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together, which no one can do in this thoughtless scene. I have my views of life to reform, and the whole plan of my conduct to new-model; and, into all, I have my health to recover. And then once more I shall venture my bark upon the waters of this wide realm; and, if she cannot weather it, I shall steer west, and try the waters of another world.’ So he reasons and resolves; but surely a worthier destiny awaits him than voluntary exile.”[^[19]]

Within a few weeks after the writing of this letter, viz. on a late Sunday in July 1819, there occurred the incident which was to lead to Irving’s own removal from Edinburgh, and affect the whole future course of his life. This was his appearance in the pulpit of St. George’s church, by the friendly arrangement of Dr. Andrew Thomson, the minister of that church, in order that Dr. Chalmers, then on a visit to Edinburgh, and looking out for an assistant to himself in his great Glasgow church and parish of St. John’s, might have a private opportunity of hearing Mr. Irving and judging of his fitness.

Let the autumn of 1819 be supposed to have passed, with Carlyle’s studies and early risings in his father’s house at Mainhill in Dumfriesshire,[^[20]] and those negotiations between Irving and Dr. Chalmers which issued in the definite appointment of Irving to the Glasgow assistantship. It was in October 1819 that this matter was settled; and then Irving, who had been on a visit to his relatives in Annan, and was on his way thence to Glasgow, to enter on his new duties, picked up Carlyle at Mainhill, for that walk of theirs up the valley of the Dryfe, and that beating-up of their common friend, Frank Dickson, in his clerical quarters, which are so charmingly described in the Reminiscences.

Next month, November 1819, when Irving was forming acquaintance with Dr. Chalmers’s congregation, and they hardly knew what to make of him,—some thinking him more like a “cavalry officer” or “brigand chief” than a young minister of the Gospel,—Carlyle was back in Edinburgh. His uncertainties and speculations as to his future, with the dream of emigration to America, had turned themselves into a vague notion that, if he gave himself to the study of law, he might possibly be able to muster somehow the two or three hundreds of pounds that would be necessary to make him a member of the Edinburgh Bar, and qualify him for walking up and down the floor of the Parliament House in wig and gown, like the grandees he had seen there in his memorable first visit to the place, with Tom Smail, ten years before. For that object residence in Edinburgh was essential, and so he had returned thither. His lodgings now seem to be no longer in Carnegie Street, but in Bristo Street,—possibly in the rooms which Irving had left.

No portion of the records relating to Carlyle’s connection with our University has puzzled me more than that which refers to his law studies after he had abandoned Divinity. From a memorandum of his own, quoted by Mr. Froude, but without date, it distinctly appears that he attended “Hume’s Lectures on Scotch Law”; and Mr. Froude adds that his intention of becoming an advocate, and his consequent perseverance in attendance on the “law lectures” in the Edinburgh University, continued for some time. Our records, however, are not quite clear in the matter. In our Matriculation Book for the session 1819–20, where every law student, as well as every arts student and every medical student, was bound to enter his name, paying a matriculation-fee of 10s., I find two Thomas Carlyles, both from Dumfriesshire. One, whose signature, in a clear and elegant hand, I should take to be that of our Carlyle at that date, enters himself as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” with the addition “5 Lit.,” signifying that he had attended the Literary or Arts Classes in four preceding sessions. The matriculation number of this Thomas Carlyle is 825. The other, whose matriculation number is 1257, enters himself, in a somewhat boyish-looking hand, as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,” with the addition “2 Lit.,” signifying that he had attended one previous session in an Arts Class. Now, all depends on the construction of the appearances of those two Carlyles in the independent class-lists that have been preserved, in the handwritings of the Professors, for that session of their common matriculation and for subsequent sessions. Without troubling the reader with the puzzling details, I may say that the records present an alternative of two suppositions: viz. either (1) Both the Thomas Carlyles who matriculated for 1819–20 became law students that session; in which case the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,” notwithstanding the too boyish-looking handwriting, and the gross misdescription of him as “2 Lit.,” was our Carlyle; or (2) Only one of the two became a law student; in which case he was the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” or our Carlyle, using “Dumfries” as the name of his county, and correctly describing himself as “5 Lit.” On the first supposition it has to be reported that Carlyle’s sole attendance in a law class was in the Scots Law Class of Professor David Hume for the session 1819–20, while the other Carlyle was in the Civil Law Class for “the Institutes” that session, but reappeared in other classes in later sessions. On the second supposition (which also involves a mistake in the registration), Carlyle attended both the Scots Law Class and the “Institutes” department of the Civil Law Class in 1819–20, and so began a new career of attendance in the University, which extended to 1823 thus:—

Session 1819–20: Hume’s Scots Law Class, and Professor Alexander Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Institutes”).

Session 1820–21: Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Pandects”), and Hope’s Chemistry Class (where the name in the Professor’s list of his vast class of 460 students is spelt “Thomas Carlisle”).

Session 1821–22: No attendance.

Session 1822–23: Scots Law Class a second time, under the new Professor, George Joseph Bell (Hume having just died).[^[21]]

With this knowledge that Carlyle did for some time after 1819 contemplate the Law as a profession,—certain as to the main fact, though a little doubtful for the present in respect of the extent of time over which his law studies were continued,—let us proceed to his Edinburgh life in general for the five years from 1819 to 1824. He was not, indeed, wholly in Edinburgh during those five years. Besides absences now and then on brief visits, e.g. to Irving in Glasgow or elsewhere in the west, we are to remember his stated vacations, longer or shorter, in the summer and autumn, at his father’s house at Mainhill in Annandale; and latterly there was a term of residence in country quarters of which there will have to be special mention at the proper date. In the main, however, from 1819 to 1824 Carlyle was an Edinburgh man. His lodgings were, first, in Bristo Street, but afterwards and more continuously at No. 3 Moray Street,—not, of course, the great Moray Place of the aristocratic West End, but a much obscurer namesake, now re-christened “Spey Street,” at right angles to Pilrig Street, just off Leith Walk. It was in these lodgings that he read and mused; it was in the streets of Edinburgh, or on the heights on her skirts, that he had his daily walks; the few friends and acquaintances he had any converse with were in Edinburgh; and it was with Edinburgh and her affairs that as yet he considered his own future fortunes as all but certain to be bound up.

No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of Edinburgh, or of any other city, than the Carlyle of those years. Those great natural faculties, unmistakably of the order called genius, and that unusual wealth of acquirement, which had been recognised in him as early as 1814 by such intimate friends as Murray, and more lately almost with awe by Margaret Gordon, had been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still manifest to the discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of them, it is with a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange moodiness of character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness and unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and others had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened themselves into settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word “habit” is misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word pass in the meantime for a state of temper which it would take many words, and some of them much softer and grander, to describe adequately, was an innate and constitutional distinction. It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the contrast between him in this respect and the man who was his immediate predecessor in the series of really great literary Scotsmen. If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain. From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own mother said of him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to deal with”), the prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and bitter broodings, addicted to the black and dismal view of things. With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. A few authentications may be quoted:—

April, 1819.—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I can give no satisfactory account to your friendly inquiries. A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not very strong.”[^[22]]

March, 1820.—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak, yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this planet. Law, I fear, must be given up: it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane.”[^[23]]

October, 1820.—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the next scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last. Expect no account of my prospects, for I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-brown shade.”[^[24]]

March 9, 1821.—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me. In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land. I must endeavour most sternly, for this state of things cannot last; and, if health do but revisit me, as I know she will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow seriously ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is settled and dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am considerably clearer than I was, and I should have been still more so had not this afternoon been wet, and so prevented me from breathing the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us, where the atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any you ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and precipices at our feet, where not a hillock rears its head unsung; with Edinburgh at their base, clustering proudly over her rugged foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged, black, venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly above me.”[^[25]]

Reminiscence in 1867.—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce resolution in abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways, and to suffer as silently and stoically as might be, if it proved (as too likely!) that I could do nothing. This kind of humour, what I sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended me all my life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for several years coming, the first and much the worst two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[^[26]]

What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness of spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which he could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return to; he had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as it was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in honourable employments, which many of his compeers in age would have been glad to get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his pocket,—a sum larger than the majority of the educated young Scotsmen about him could then finger, or perhaps ever fingered afterwards in all their lives. All this has to be distinctly remembered; for the English interpretations of Carlyle’s early “poverty,” “hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the Scottish standard of his time, by the standard of say two-thirds of those who had been his fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh, Carlyle’s circumstances so far had been even enviable. The cause of his abnormal unhappiness was to be found in himself. Was it, then, his ill-health,—that fearful “dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his twenty-third year, or just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, and which clung to him, as we know, to the very end of his days? There can be no doubt that this was a most important factor in the case. His dyspepsia must have intensified his gloom, and may have accounted for those occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged on hypochondria. But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought along with him from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as he told the blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy and hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach.”[^[27]] In fact, as Luther maintained when he denounced the Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal fellows for their persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” as if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a spiritual kind, the mere pathological explanations which physicians are apt to trust to will not suffice in such instances. What, then, of those spiritual distresses, arising from a snapping of the traditional and paternal creed, and a soul left thus rudderless for the moment, which Luther recognised as the most terrible, and had experienced in such measure himself?

That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of himself away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father and mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that his clear intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the theology from which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The main evidence is that, though he had some central core of faith still to seek as a substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a new way the old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, Num detur Religio Naturalis?, and had not yet attained to that light, describable as a fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or Supernaturalism, in the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,—yet he was not involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and “backward hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so cantingly, in feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in his case of any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a theosophic refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy. On the contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of moral or really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have settled once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the limits of the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human intellect in that class of considerations.

Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may suggest itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent and imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we may well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a while by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost Margaret Gordon.

Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have their due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the main and all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in those Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a scabbard, a noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies and ambitions measuring itself against common souls and against social obstructions, and all but frantic for lack of employment. Schoolmastering he had given up with detestation; the Church he had given up with indifference; the Law had begun to disgust him, or was seeming problematical. Where others could have rested, happy in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle could not. What was this Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which he was living, the solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on speaking terms with those that were considered her magnates, the very best of whom he was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary, to vanquish and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant glare round Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this innocent and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the throat and compel to listen.

Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some elucidation with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel for conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive atmosphere, not of vulgar mauvaise honte, though such it is generally esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit from nature, and which are mostly due to the undefined station I have hitherto occupied in society.”[^[28]] Again, to a correspondent in March 1820, “The fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the grand whole in this best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,—with just one observation more, which I throw out for your benefit, should you ever come to need such an advice. It is to keep the profession you have adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty ideas of honour and uprightness which a studious secluded life naturally begets, will in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if friends and other aids are wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow leaf.”[^[29]] These feelings were known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s despondency over his poor social prospects, his enormous power of complaint, or, as the Scots call it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar a topic with them as with his own family.

No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more encouragingly to him than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some of Irving’s letters that we gather the information that certain peculiarities in Carlyle’s own demeanour were understood to be operating against his popularity even within the limited Edinburgh circle in which he did for the present move. “Known you must be before you can be employed,” Irving writes to him in December 1819. “Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a winning, attaching, accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most favourable. It convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse. They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical, unthinking drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter. Therefore, my dear friend, some other way is to be sought for.”[^[30]] In a letter in March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is, my dear Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of it, but your feelings and affections; which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of mind.”[^[31]] This is Margaret Gordon’s advice over again; and it enables us to add to our conception of Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh struggling and obstruction the fact of his fearlessness and aggressiveness in speech, his habit even then of that lightning rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with sarcasms and stinging contempts falling mercilessly upon his auditors themselves, which characterised his conversation to the last. This habit, or some of the forms of it, he had derived, he thought, from his father.[^[32]]

Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s most immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of the kind at his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day, and also of one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away from Edinburgh. Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the higher mathematics. My recollection is that he used to connect the break-down of his health with his continued wrestlings with Newton’s Principia even after he had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh; and he would speak of the grassy slopes of the Castle Hill, then not railed off from Princes Street, as a place where he liked to lie in fine weather, poring over that or other books. His readings, however, were now, as before, very miscellaneous. The Advocates’ Library, to which he had access, I suppose, through some lawyer of his acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books such as he had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to it, alone of Scottish institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this Library; and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may judge from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When I am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take them in flank by a zealous course of study.”

One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just after settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was the study of the German language. French, so far as the power of reading it was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his boyhood; Italian, to some less extent, had come easily enough; but German tasked his perseverance and required time. He was especially diligent in it through the years 1819 and 1820, with such a measure of success that in August in the latter year he could write to one friend, “I could tell you much about the new Heaven and new Earth which a slight study of German literature has revealed to me,” and in October of the same year to another, “I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest: they are the greatest men at present with me.” His German readings were continued, and his admiration of the German Literature grew.

Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in Literature himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—the very vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray, had discerned his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to which the failure of his successive experiments in established professions had ever since been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had been most importunately urging him in those letters, just quoted, in which, after telling him that, by reason of the asperity and irritating contemptuousness of his manner, he would never be rightly appreciated by his usual appearances in society, or even by his splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his advice in the words “Some other way is to be sought for.” What Irving meant, and urged at some length, and with great practicality, in those letters, was that Carlyle should at once think of some literary attempts, congenial to his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as possible, and aim at a connection with the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood.

Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while, turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly impossible that a young man who for five years already had been writing letters to his friends the English style of which moved them to astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read the specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have been exercising his literary powers privately in other things than letters, and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of pieces suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such piece, he tells us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the editor of some magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the descriptive tourist kind,” giving some account of Carlyle’s first impressions of the Yarrow country, so famous in Scottish song and legend, as visited by him in one of his journeys from Edinburgh to Annandale. What became of it he never knew, the editor having returned no answer.[^[33]] Although, after this rebuff, there was no new attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there can be little doubt that he had then a few other things by him, and not in prose only, with which he could have repeated the trial. It is very possible that several specimens of those earliest attempts of his in prose and verse, published by himself afterwards when periodicals were open to him, remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but two have come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title “Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story,” but certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended for the press.[^[34]] The other is of more interest to us here, from its picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life. It is entitled “Peter Nimmo,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine for February 1831, the next number after that containing Cruthers and Jonson.

Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was known about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being called Peter Nimmo, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him, Sir Peter Nimmo. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking object, of unknown age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched, and garments not of the cleanest, the chief of which was a long, threadbare, snuff-brown great-coat. His craze was that of attending the University class-rooms and listening to the lectures. So long had this craze continued that a University session without “Sir Peter Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for the students to laugh at and perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have been an interruption of the established course of things; but, as his appearance in a class-room had become a horror to the Professors, and pity for him had passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of disorder, steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at least to reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not get rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to the thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already in the heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr. Hill Burton wrote of his first session at the University, viz. in 1830–31, when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an important figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit himself, nor any quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant grotesqueness in it to create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s description of him then; and the impression Burton had received of his real character was that he was “merely an idly-inclined and stupidish man of low condition, who, having once got into practice as a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the occupation paid better than honest industry, and had cunning enough to keep it up.” He used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various houses, sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s company at dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about, introducing himself at country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he had obtained access to Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name for his passport; and, as he had judiciously left all the talk to Wordsworth, the impression he had left was such that the poet had afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had ever met with.”[^[35]]——Burton, however, though thus familiar with “Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his real standing by his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly, he had at one time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced him in the University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s knowledge of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking out one or two classes. In the Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler, a small satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session 1823–24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the matter consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man, whose abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze forth, and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical classes, having entered himself in the matriculation book, in conspicuously large characters, as “Petrus Buchanan Nimmo, Esquire, &c., Dumbartonshire,” with the addition that he was in the 17th year of his theological studies. Six years previously, viz. in 1813–14, he is registered as in the 8th year of his literary course. In 1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s fellow-students in the 2d Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in 1810–11 he was with Carlyle in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in the Logic Class. Peter seems to have been lax in his dates; but there can be no doubt that he was a known figure about Edinburgh University before Carlyle entered it, and that the whole of Carlyle’s University career, as of the careers of all the students of Edinburgh University for another generation, was spent in an atmosphere of Peter Nimmo. What Peter had been originally it is difficult to make out. The probability is that he had come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid youth from Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he had gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.

Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for the theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the essential portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical “Rhapsody,” consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and an epilogue. In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “Numeris fertur lege solutis,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the solitary bard in quest of a subject:—

Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract,

Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act?

Matters not, so thou have ink and see the Why and How;

Drops of copperas-dye make There a Here, and Then a Now.

Must the brain lie fallow simply since it is alone,

And the heart, in heaths and splashy weather, turn to stone?

Shall a living Man be mute as twice-sold mackerel?

If not speaking, if not acting, I can write,—in doggerel.

For a subject? Earth is wonder-filled; for instance, Peter Nimmo:

Think of Peter’s “being’s mystery”: I will sing of him O!

In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and appearance:—

Thrice-loved Nimmo! art thou still, in spite of Fate,

Footing those cold pavements, void of meal and mutton,

To and from that everlasting College-gate,

With thy blue hook-nose, and ink-horn hung on button?

Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the vicinity, and meditating his own future:—

Dark lay the world in Peter’s labouring breast:

Here was he (words of import strange),—He here!

Mysterious Peter, on mysterious hest:

But Whence, How, Whither, nowise will appear.

Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has come, and on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the sight of the little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the donkey canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His transition from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the third part sings of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the fourth part he is the poor mendicant Peter who has become the Wandering Jew of the University, and whose mode of living is a problem:—

Where lodges Peter? How his pot doth boil,

This truly knoweth, guesseth, no man;

He spins not, neither does he toil;

Lives free as ancient Greek or Roman.

Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part of the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we must hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:—

At midnight hour did Peter come;

Right well I knew his tap and tread;

With smiles I placed two pints of rum

Before him, and one cold sheep’s-head.

Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy of his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great prospects of various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s head reduced to a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is sent off in a wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather indistinctly in three stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:—

Sure ’tis Peter, sure ’tis Peter:

Life’s a variorum.

Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[^[36]] was not Carlyle’s element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse altogether, and was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated, which one would not willingly let die, it had been to prose performances that he looked forward when, on bidding farewell to Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for the booksellers” among the employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh. Scientific subjects had seemed the most promising: and among the books before him in “those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were materials for a projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s letter of December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the Edinburgh Review, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of Gravitation, of which we hear in the Reminiscences. The manuscript, carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject was not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or because editors are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing more was heard of it.

This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance, Carlyle might have languished without literary employment of any kind for a good while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David Brewster, afterwards Sir David. The Edinburgh Encyclopædia, which Brewster had begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his twenty-ninth year, and which had been intended to be in twelve volumes, thick quarto, double-columns, had now, in 1820, reached its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther than the letter M. Among the contributors had been, or were, these: Babbage, Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel, Dionysius Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor Dunbar, the Rev. Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon, David Irving, Professor Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor Leslie, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. This was very good company in which to make a literary début, were it only in such articles of hackwork as might be intrusted conveniently to an unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted to Carlyle were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in just as the poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles continuing the line of some of Campbell’s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, were his first six, all under the letter M, and all supplied in 1820, with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823 he was to contribute ten more, running through the letter N, and ending in the sixteenth volume, under the letter P, with Mungo Park, William Pitt the Elder, and William Pitt the Younger. It was no bad practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have brought him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to something more for casual bits of translation done for Brewster. More agreeable to himself, and better paid in proportion, may have been two articles which he contributed to the New Edinburgh Review, a quarterly which was started in July 1821, by Waugh and Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the previous Edinburgh Monthly Review, and which came to an end, as might have been predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823. In the second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an article of 21 pages by Carlyle on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends, to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages on Goethe’s Faust.

Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment and impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest approaches to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of Irving, whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn meetings and strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in Irving’s visits now and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the westward excursions, when the two friends were on Drumclog Moss, and were talking together in the open air on that battle-field of the Covenanters, that the good Irving wound from Carlyle the confession that he no longer thought as Irving did of the Christian Religion. This was in 1820.

More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to Edinburgh, in June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to Haddington, and introduced him, at the house of the widowed Mrs. Welsh, to that lady’s only child, Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former pupil, and thought of by him as not impossibly to be his wife even yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement interfered, she was not quite twenty years of age, but the most remarkable girl in all that neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form, features pretty rather than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale, black hair over a finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant black eyes, she had an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or culture, to be the feminine match of either of the two men that now stood before her.——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the wife of Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as she appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse, the now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh, she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on the dense slope down from the University to the back of the Canongate; and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old Haddington nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not quite so old as I had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she talked of her recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and these, as near as possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was young, she was a fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he cam aboot her. Then there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then there was Maister Carlyle himsel’; and he cam to finish her off, like. I’m told he’s a great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in London.”——That was certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there stood before the graceful and spirited girl in Haddington not only the gigantic, handsome, black-haired Irving, whom she had known since her childhood, but also the friend he had brought with him,—less tall than Irving, of leaner and less handsome frame, but with head of the most powerful shape, thick dark-brown hair several shades lighter than her own, and an intenser genius than Irving’s visible in his deep eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about this time that Irving used to rattle up his friend from his desponding depths by the prophecy of the coming time when they would shake hands across a brook as respectively first in British Divinity and in British Literature, and when people, after saying “Both these fellows are from Annandale,” would add “Where is Annandale?” The girl, looking at the two, may have already been thinking of Irving’s jocular prophecy.

A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude to a memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the Sartor Resartus.

In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has deserted the popular faith, passes through three stages before he attains to complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in the state of mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves on to a middle point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally he reaches “The Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question is that in which, having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting No,” the prey of the most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly helpless and abject, there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry day, as he was toiling along the wretched little street in Paris called Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer, a kind of miraculous rousing and illumination:—

“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance. Thus had the Everlasting No (das Ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!’ It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”

In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he declares that, while most of Sartor Resartus is mere symbolical myth, this account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the imaginary Teufelsdröckh in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is a record of what happened literally to himself one day in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. He remembered the incident well, he says in the memorandum, and the very spot in Leith Walk where it occurred. The memorandum itself does not date the incident; but Mr. Froude, from authority in his possession, dates it in June 1821. As that was the month of the first visit to Haddington, and first sight of Jane Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever was the amount of change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his recollection of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an exaggeration to say, as Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of Carlyle’s complete “conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense that he then “achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative, by which the whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place, we have Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his Reminiscences that his complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of finding that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods,” and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the eternal blue of Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years after the present date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam Hill between 26th May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place, it would be a mistake to suppose that the spiritual change which Carlyle intended to describe, whether in his own case or in Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from the “Everlasting No,” through the “Centre of Indifference,” to the “Everlasting Yes,” was a change of intellectual theory in relation to any system of theological doctrine. The parting from the old theology, in the real case as well as in the imaginary one, had been complete; and, though there had been a continued prosecution of the question as to the possibility of a Natural Religion, the form in which that question had been prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of personal duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the universe” which Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith was the spiritualistic one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative hypothesis of a struggle between the Divine and the Diabolic, can hardly be doubted. No constitution such as his could have adopted the other theory, or rested in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have been adopted however passionately and held however tenaciously, what a tumult of mind, what a host of despairs and questionings, before its high abstractions could be brought down into a rule for personal behaviour, and wrapt with any certainty or comfort round one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How was that vast Inconceivable related to this little life and its world; or was there no relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible power? What of the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man amid them? What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental groping and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description is that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so much on an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the roots of the conscience and the will. Teufelsdröckh’s mental progress out of the mood of the “Everlasting No” is a succession of practical determinations as to the conduct of his own spirit, each determination coming as an inspired effort of the will, altering his demeanour from that moment, and the last bringing him into a final condition of freedom and self-mastery. The effort of the will does indeed diffuse a corresponding change through the intellect; but it is as if on the principle, “Henceforth such and such a view of things shall be my view,”—which is but a variation of the Scriptural principle that it is by doing the law that one comes to know the gospel.

The Leith Walk incident, accordingly, is to be taken as the equivalent in Carlyle’s case to that first step out of the “Everlasting No” of which he makes so much in the biography of Teufelsdröckh. It was not by any means his complete conversion or emancipation, but it was a beginning. It was, to use his own words, a change at least “in the temper of his misery,” and a change for the better, inasmuch as it substituted indignation and defiance for what had been mere fear and whimpering. His mood thenceforth, though still miserable enough, was to be less abject and more stern. On the whole, if this construction of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821 does not make so much of it as Mr. Froude’s does, it leaves enough of reason for any Edinburgh youth, when he next chances to be in that straggling thoroughfare between Edinburgh and Leith, to pause near the middle of it, and look about him. The spot must have been just below Pilrig Street, which was Carlyle’s starting-point from his lodgings in Moray Street (now Spey Street) on his way to Leith.

There was, at all events, no very obvious change in Carlyle’s mood and demeanour in Edinburgh in the latter part of 1821. His own report in the Reminiscences is still of the dreariness of his life, his gruff humours, and gloomy prognostications. But, corroborated though this report is in the main by contemporary letters, it would be a mistake, I believe, to accept it absolutely, or without such abatements as mere reflection on the circumstances will easily suggest. It is impossible to suppose that Carlyle, at this period of his life or at any other, can have been all unhappy, even when he thought himself most unhappy. There must have been ardours and glows of soul, great joys and exhilarations, corresponding to the complexity of nervous endowment that could descend to such depths of sadness. From himself we learn, in particular, how the society of Irving, whether in their Annandale meetings, or in Irving’s visits to Edinburgh, had always an effect upon his spirits like that of sunrising upon night or fog. Irving’s letters must have had a similar effect: such a letter, for example, as that from Glasgow in which Irving had written, “I am beginning to see the dawn of the day when you shall be plucked by the literary world from my solitary, and therefore more clear, admiration,” and had added this interesting note respecting Dr. Chalmers: “Our honest Demosthenes, or shall I call him Chrysostom?—Boanerges would fit him better!—seems to have caught some glimpse of your inner man, though he had few opportunities; for he never ceases to be inquiring after you.”[^[37]]

Whether such letters brought Carlyle exhilaration or not, there must have been exhilaration for him, or at least roused interest, on Irving’s own account, in the news, which came late in 1821, that Irving was not to be tied much longer to the great Glasgow Demosthenes and his very difficult congregation. After two years and a half of the Glasgow assistantship to Dr. Chalmers, there had come that invitation to the pastorship of the Scotch Church, Hatton Garden, London, which Irving received as exultingly, as he afterwards said, as if it had been a call to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He passed through Edinburgh on his way to London to offer himself on probation to the little colony of London Scots that thought he might suit them for their minister; and Carlyle was the last person he saw before leaving Scotland. The scene of their parting was the coffee-room of the old Black Bull Hotel in Leith Street, then the great starting-place for the Edinburgh coaches. It was “a dim night, November or December, between nine and ten,” Carlyle tells us; but Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving helps us to the more precise dating of December 1821, a day or two before Christmas. They had their talk in the coffee-room; and Carlyle, on going, gave Irving a bundle of cigars, that he might try one or two of them in the tedium of his journey next day on the top of the coach. Who smoked the cigars no one ever knew; for Irving, in the hurry of starting next morning, forgot to take them with him, and left them lying in a stall in the coffee-room.

That meeting at the Black Bull in Leith Street, however, was to be remembered by both. Irving had gone to London to set the Thames on fire; Carlyle remained in Edinburgh for his mathematical teaching, his private German readings, his hackwork for Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and the chances of continued contributorship to the New Edinburgh Review. Thus the year 1821 ended, and the year 1822 began.