PART I.—1809–1818
Early in November 1809 two boys walked together from Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh, to attend the classes in the University there. The distance, as the crow flies, is about sixty miles; and the boys took three days to it. The elder, who had been at College in the previous session, and therefore acted as the guide, generally stalked on a few paces ahead, whistling an Irish tune to himself. The younger, who was not quite fourteen years of age, and had never been out of Dumfriesshire before, followed rather wearily, irritated by the eternal Irish tune in front of him, but mainly given up to his own “bits of reflections in the silence of the moors and hills.” The elder of the two boys was a Thomas Smail, afterwards of some note as a Burgher minister in Galloway; the younger was Thomas Carlyle.
Of the arrival of the two boys in Edinburgh on the 9th of November 1809, after their third day’s walk of twenty miles, and of Carlyle’s first stroll, that afternoon, under Smail’s convoy, through some of the main streets, to see the sights, one may read in his own Reminiscences. What he remembered best of that first stroll was the look of the Old High Street, with St. Giles’s Kirk on one side and the old Luckenbooths running up the middle in its broadest part, but chiefly the amazing spectacle to which he was introduced when Smail pushed open a door behind St. Giles’s Kirk, and he found himself in the outer house of the Court of Session, amid the buzz of the lawyers and others walking up and down, with the red-robed judges hearing cases in their little throned enclosures.
Content with the description of that first stroll, he leaves us to imagine how, in the first days and weeks of his residence in the city, he gradually extended his acquaintance with it by further rambles, and by inspection of this and that interesting to a young stranger. The task is not difficult. The lodging which Smail and he had taken between them was, he says, “a clean-looking, most cheap lodging,” in the “poor locality” called Simon Square. The locality still survives under that name, though hardly as a square any longer, but only a poor street, at the back of Nicolson Street, on the left hand as one goes southwards from the University, and accessible most directly by an arched passage called Gibb’s Entry. From that obscure centre, by walks from it in the mornings, and returns to it during the day and in the evenings, we can see the little Dumfriesshire fellow gradually conquering for himself some notion of the whole of that Edinburgh into which he had come. It was the old Edinburgh, of less than 100,000 inhabitants, which we think of so fondly now as the Edinburgh of Scott before his novels had been heard of and when his fame depended chiefly on his poems, of Jeffrey in the early heyday of his lawyership and editorship of the Edinburgh Review, and of the other local celebrities, Whig and Tory, immortalised in tradition and in Cockburn’s Memorials.
It was chiefly of the externals of the city that the boy was making his notes; for the living celebrities, as he tells us, were hardly even names to him then. Scott and Jeffrey, he says, may have been in the peripatetic crowd of wigged and gowned lawyers he had seen in the hall of the Parliament House on the day of his arrival; but the only physiognomy he had marked there so as to know it again was that of John Clerk of Eldin. A reminiscence which I have heard from his own lips enables me, however, to connect his first days in Edinburgh with the memory of at least one Edinburgh worthy of a still elder generation. It was on the 18th of December 1809, or just six weeks after Carlyle’s arrival in Edinburgh, that the well-known Dr. Adam, Rector of the High School, died; and I have heard Carlyle tell how the event impressed him, and how he went to see the funeral procession of the old scholar start from the High School yard at the foot of Infirmary Street. With a number of other boys, he said, he hung on by the railings outside, looking in upon the gathered assemblage of mourners. He seemed to remember the scene with peculiar vividness; for, after picturing himself as a boy hanging on by the High School railings, and watching the incidents within, he added, “Ay me! that moment then, and this now, and nothing but the rushing of Time’s wings between!”[[10]] He had a liking to the last for old Dr. Adam. I have heard him say that any Scotsman who was at a loss on the subject of shall and will would find the whole doctrine in a nutshell in two or three lucid sentences of Dr. Adam’s Latin Grammar; and I had an idea at the time that he had used this brief precept of Dr. Adam’s little book in his own early practice of English.
At the date of Dr. Adam’s death Carlyle had been for six weeks a student in the University, with pupils of Dr. Adam among his fellow-students on the same benches. One can see his matriculation signature, “Thomas Carlyle,” in his own hand,—a clear and good boyish hand, differing considerably from that which he afterwards wrote,—in the alphabetically arranged matriculation list of the Arts Students of the session 1809–10. It is the sixth signature under the letter C, the immediately preceding signature being that of a Dumfries youth named “Irvine Carlyle” (spelt so, and not “Irving Carlyle,”) of whom there is mention in the Reminiscences. It is clear that the two Carlyles were drawn to each other by community of name and county, if not by kin, and had gone up for matriculation together.
The College of those days was not the present complete quadrangle, but a chaotic jumble of inconvenient old class-rooms, with only parts of the present building risen among them, and finished and occupied. The classes which Carlyle attended in his first session were the 1st Humanity Class, under Professor Alexander Christison, and the 1st Greek Class, under Professor George Dunbar. From an examination of the records I find that among his class-fellows in both classes were the aforesaid Irving Carlyle, and Lord Inverurie, afterwards seventh Earl of Kintore, and that among his class-fellows in the 1st Greek Class was the late venerable Earl of Wemyss, then Lord Elcho. Neither from the records nor from the Reminiscences can anything be gathered of the history of the two classes through the session, or of the place taken in each by the young Dumfriesshire boy among the medley of his fellow-students, from 150 to 200 in number. The Latin class-room, we do learn from the Reminiscences, was a very dark room, so that Professor Christison, having two students of the name of Carlyle, never succeeded in distinguishing the one from the other; which was all the harder, Carlyle thought, because the other Carlyle, Mr. Irving Carlyle, was not only different physically, being “an older, considerably bigger boy, with red hair, wild buck teeth, and scorched complexion,” but was also the worst Latinist in the whole class. Carlyle himself had been so well grounded in Latin at Annan School that probably he could have held his own in the class even against Dr. Adam’s pupils from the Edinburgh High School. To the end of his life, at all events, he was a fair Latinist. To Greek he never in later life made any pretence; and whatever Greek he did learn from Dunbar,—which can have been but small in quantity,—must have faded through disuse. He retained, however, a high admiration for the Elementa Linguæ Græcæ of Dr. James Moor of Glasgow,—which was, I suppose, the Greek grammar then used in Dunbar’s class,—thinking it the very best grammar of any language for teaching purposes he had ever seen.
While we know so little of Carlyle’s Greek and Latin studies in his first University session, it is something to know that he was a pretty diligent reader of books that session from the College Library. Having examined a dusty old folio of the library receipts and outgoings, which chances to have been preserved, I am able to report that Carlyle had duly paid, before December 1809, his deposit or security of one guinea, entitling him to take books out, and that, in that month and the succeeding month of January 1810, he had out the following books, in parcels or in succession, in the following order:—Robertson’s History of Scotland, vol. ii.; Cook’s Voyages; Byron’s Narrative, i.e. “the Hon. John Byron’s Narrative of the Great Distresses suffered by Himself and his Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, 1740–6”; the first volume of Gibbon; two volumes of Shakespeare; a volume of the Arabian Nights; Congreve’s Works; another volume of the Arabian Nights; two volumes of Hume’s England; Gil Blas; a third volume of Shakespeare; and a volume of the Spectator. This is a sufficiently remarkable series of volumes for a boy of fourteen to have had out from the College library; and other books from other libraries may have been lying at the same time on the table in the small room in Simon Square which he shared with Tom Smail. What is most remarkable is the run upon books of voyages and travels, and on classic books of English literature, or books of mere literary amusement, rather than on academic books. Clearly there had been a great deal of previous and very miscellaneous reading at Ecclefechan and Annan, with the already formed result of a passion for reading, and very decided notions and tastes as to the kinds of books that might be worth looking after. But how, whether at Ecclefechan or in Annan, had the sedate boy been attracted to Congreve?
At the close of Carlyle’s first college session in April 1810 he returned to Ecclefechan. He was met on the road near the village, as he tells us so touchingly in his Reminiscences, by his father, who had walked out, “with a red plaid about him,” on the chance of seeing Tom coming; and the whole of the vacation was spent by him at home in his father’s house. It is not, therefore, till the beginning of the session of 1810–11 that we again hear of him in Edinburgh. He then duly matriculated for his second session, his signature again standing in the alphabetical Arts matriculation-list immediately after that of his namesake “Irving Carlyle” (now spelt so). His classes for this session were the 1st Mathematical Class, under Professor John Leslie, and the Logic Class, under Professor David Ritchie; and I have found no note of his having gone back that year, or any other, for a second course of Latin from Professor Christison. In the 1st Mathematical Class, consisting of seventy students, he had again Irving Carlyle on the benches with him; in the Logic Class, consisting of 194 students, the same Irving Carlyle was one of his fellow-students, and the late Earl of Wemyss was another. What he made of the Logic Class we have not the least intimation; and it is only by inference that we know that he must have distinguished himself in the Mathematical Class and given evidences there of his unusual mathematical ability. As before, however, he found variation, or diversion, from his work for the classes by diligent reading in his lodgings. Between Saturday the 1st December 1810 and Saturday 9th March 1811, I find, he took from the University library the following books in the following order:—Voyages and Travels, the 15th volume of some collection under that name; a volume of Fielding’s works; a volume of Smollett; Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind; a book called Scotland Described; two more volumes of Fielding’s works; Locke’s Essay in folio; another volume of Fielding; a volume of Anacharsis, i.e., of an English Translation of the Abbé Barthélémy’s Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece during the middle of the Fourth Century before the Christian Era; and a volume of some translation of Don Quixote. His choice of books, it will be seen, is still very independent. Reid’s Inquiry and Locke’s Essay connect themselves with the work in the Logic Class; but the other volumes were evidently for mere amusement. Whether it was still in the lodging in Simon Square, and with Smail for his chum, that these books were read, is uncertain. His comradeship with Smail continued, indeed, he tells us, over two sessions; but the lodging may have been changed. It was still, doubtless, somewhere near the University.
For the session of 1811–12 the Matriculation Book is not alphabetically in Faculties, but general or mixed for the three Faculties of Arts, Law, and Medicine. There were 1475 students for those three Faculties conjointly; and “Thomas Carlyle, Ecclefechan,” appears among them, his matriculation number being 966. That session, his third at the University, he attended the 2d Greek Class, under Dunbar, the 2d Mathematical Class, under Leslie, and the Moral Philosophy Class, under Dr. Thomas Brown. In the Greek Class, which consisted of 189 students, he had among his class-fellows the late venerable Sir Robert Christison, Sir Robert’s twin-brother, Alexander Christison, the late Earl of Wemyss again, his brother, the Honourable Walter Charteris, a Thomas Murray from Kirkcudbrightshire, afterwards a well-known citizen of Edinburgh, the inextinguishable Irving Carlyle, and an Andrew Combe, whom I identify with the subsequently well-known Dr. Andrew Combe, the brother of George Combe the phrenologist. In the Mathematical Class, which numbered forty-six, there were several Dumfriesshire students besides himself; and it was in this 2d Mathematical Class, if the tradition is correct, that Carlyle took the first prize,—another Dumfriesshire youth, who lived in the same lodging with him, taking the second. I have turned with most interest, in this session, to the “List of Students attending Dr. Thomas Brown’s Class,” preserved in the peculiarly neat, small handwriting of Dr. Brown himself. It was the second session of Brown’s full tenure of the Professorship of Moral Philosophy in succession to Dugald Stewart, and the fame of his lectures was at its highest. The class consisted of 151 students; and among them, besides Carlyle and his inseparable Irving Carlyle, and a Robert Mitchell and a Paulus Aemilius Irving, both from Dumfriesshire, there were Duncan McNeill, afterwards Lord Colonsay, his brother, John McNeill, Sir Andrew Agnew, David Welsh, afterwards Dr. David Welsh and Professor of Church History, and a James Bisset from Aberdeenshire, whom I identify with the late Rev. Dr. Bisset of Bourtie. Some of these were outsiders, already in the Divinity or Law Classes, who had returned to the Moral Philosophy Class for the benefit of Dr. Brown’s brilliant lectures,—notably young David Welsh, who had already attended the class for two sessions, but was full of enthusiasm for Brown, whose biographer and editor he was to be in time. Carlyle, I am sorry to say, was not one of the admirers of the brilliant Brown. Over and over again I have heard him speak of Brown, and always with mimicry and contempt, as “a finical man they called Brown, or sometimes Missy Brown, that used to spout poetry.” This can hardly have been out of disregard for metaphysics as such, for he had much respect for Dugald Stewart, the then retired professor. The dislike seems to have been partly personal, partly to the new kind of highly ingenious metaphysics which Brown was trying to substitute for the older and more orthodox Scottish Philosophy of Reid and Stewart. At all events, it is worthy of note that those brilliant lectures of Thomas Brown, which James Mill and John Stuart Mill admired so much in their published form, regarding them as an introduction to much that is best in modern British Philosophy, had no effect, in their actual delivery, on the hard-headed young Carlyle, but fell upon him as mere dazzle and moonshine.