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.