LltJKAKT univlRSity of california SAN DIEGO -^ / \I^ pr ■F'7 IS V. I THOMAS CARLYLE VOL. I. PRINTED BY KELLY AND CO., MIDDLE MILL, KINGST0N-ON-THAMB8 ; AJ)D GATE STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, W.C. THOMAS CARLYLE, 1849. TEEOMAS CAKLYLE A HISTORY OF THE FIRST FORTY YEARS OF HIS LIFE 1795-1835 BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A. FORMERLY FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. L WITH PORTRAITS AND ETCHINGS NEW EDITION m LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO 1891 All rights reserved PREFACE. {REPRINTED FROM THE FIRST EDITIOy.) Mr. Carlyle expressed a desire in his will that of him no biography should be written. I find the same reluc- tance in his Journal. No one, he said, was likely to understand a history, the secret of which was unknown to his closest friends. He hoped that his wishes would be respected. Partly to take the place of a biography of himself, and partly for other reasons, he collected the letters of his wife — letters which covered the whole period of his life in London to the date of her death, when his own active work was finished. He prepared them for pub- lication, adding notes and introductory explanations, as the last sacred duty which remained to him in the world. He intended it as a monument to a character of extreme beauty ; while it would tell the public as much about himself as it could reasonably expect to learn. These letters he placed in my hands eleven years ago, with materials for an Introduction which he was him- self unable to complete. He could do no more with it, he said. He could not make up his mind to direct positively the publication even of the letters themselves. He wished them to be published, but he left the decision to myself; and when I was reluctant to undertake the vj PREFACE. sole responsibility, he said that, if I was in doubt when the time came, I might consult his brother John and his friend ]Mr. Forster. Had he rested here, my duty would have been clear. The collection of letters, with the Memoir of Mrs. Car- lyle which was to form part of the Introduction, would have been considered among us, and would have been either published or suppressed, as we might jointly determine. Mr. Carlyle's remaining papers would have been sealed up after his death, and by me at least no use would have been made of them. Two years later, however, soon after he had made his will, Carlyle discovered that, whether he wished it or not, a life, or perhaps various lives, of himself would certainly appear when he was gone. When a man has exercised a large influence on the minds of his contem- poraries, the world requires to know whether his own actions have corresponded with his teaching, and whether his moral and personal character entitles him to confidence. This is not idle curiosity ; it is a legiti- mate demand. In proportion to a man's greatness is the scrutiny to which his conduct is submitted. Byron, Burns, Scott, Shelley, Kousseau, Voltaire, Goethe, Pope, tSwift, are but instances, to which a hundred others might be added, showing that the public will not be satisfied without sifting the history of its men of genius to the last grain of fact which can be ascertained about them. The publicity of their private lives has been, is, and will be, either the reward or the penalty of their intellectual distinction. Carlyle knew that he could not escape. Since a ' Life ' of him there would certainly be, he wished it to be as authentic as possible. Besides PREFACE. vii the INIemoir of Mrs. Carlyle, he Lad written several others, mainly autobiographical, not distinctly to be printed, but with no fixed purpose that they should not be printed. These, with his journals and the whole of his correspondence, he made over to me, with unfettered discretion to use in any way that I might think good. In the papers thus in my possession, Carlyle's history, external and spiritual, lay out before me as in a map. By recasting the entire material, by selecting chosen passages out of his own and his wife's letters, by ex- hibiting the fair and beautiful side of the story only, it would have been easy, without suppressing a single material point, to draw a picture of a faultless character. When the Devil's advocate has said his worst against Carlyle, he leaves a figure still of unblemished integrity, purity, loftiness of purpose, and inflexible resolution to do right, as of a man living consciously under his Maker's eye, and with his thoughts fixed on the account which he would have to render of his talents. Of a person of whom malice must acknowledge so much as this, the prickly aspects might fairly be passed by in silence ; and if I had studied my own comfort or the pleasure of my immediate readers, I should have produced a portrait as agreeable, and at least as faithful, as those of the favoured saints in the Catholic calendar. But it would have been a portrait without individuality — an ideal, or in other words, an ' idol,' to be worshipped one day and thrown away the next. Least of all men could such idealising be ventured with Carlyle, to whom untruth of any kind was abominable. If he was to be known at all, he chose to be known as he was, with his angularities, his sharp speeches, his special peculiarities. VIU PREFACE. meritorious or unmeritorious, precisely as they had actually been. He has himself laid down the con- ditions under which a biographer must do his work if he would do it honestly, without the fear of man before him ; and in dealing with Carlyle's own memory I have felt myself bound to conform to his own rule. He shall speak for himself. I extract a passage from his review of Lockhart's ' Life of Sir Walter Scott.' ^ ' One thing we hear greatly blamed in Mr. Lock- hart, that he has been too communicative, indiscreet, and has recorded much that ought to have lain suppressed. Persons are mentioned, and circum- stances not always of an ornamental sort. It would appear that there is far less reticence than was looked for ! Various persons, name and surname, have " received pain." Nay, the very hero of the bio- gi'aphy is rendered unheroic ; unornamental facts of him, and of those he had to do with, being set forth in plain English : hence " personality," " indis- cretion," or worse, " sanctities of private life," &c. How delicate, decent, is English biography, bless its mealy mouth ! A Damocles' sword of Respextability hangs for ever over the poor English life-writer (as it does over poor English life in general), and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said, " There are no English lives worth reading, except those of players, who, by the nature of the case, have bidden respectability good day." The English biographer has long felt that if in writing his biography he wrote down anything that could by ' Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 221 sqq. PREFACE. ix possibility offend any man, he had written wrong. The plain consequence was that, properly speaking, no biography whatever could be produced. The poor biographer, having the fear not of Grod before his eyes, was obliged to retire as it were into vacuum, and wi-ite in the most melancholy straitened manner, with only vacuum for a result. Vain that he wrote, and that we kept reading volume on volume. There was no biography, but some vague ghost of a bio- graphy, white, stainless, without feature or substance ; i^acvAvm as we say, and wind and shadow, ... Of all the praises copiously bestowed on Mr. Lockhart's work there is none in reality so creditable to him as this same censure which has also been pretty copious. It is a censure better than a good many praises. He is found guilty of having said this and that, calculated not to be entirely pleasant to this man and that ; in other words, calculated to give him and the thing he worked in a living set of features, not to leave him vague in the white beatified ghost condition. Several men, as we hear, cry out, " See, there is some- thing written not entirely pleasant to me ! " Good friend, it is pity ; but who can help it ? They that will crowd about bonfires may sometimes very fairly get their beards singed ; it is the price they pay for such illumination ; natural twilight is safe and free to all. For our part we hope all manner of biographies that are written in England will hence- forth be written so. If it is fit that they be written otherwise, then it is still fitter that they be not written at all. To produce not things, but the ghosts of things, can never be the duty of man. . . . X PREFACE. The biographer has this problem set before him : to delineate a likeness of the earthly pilgrimage of a man. He will compute well what profit is in it, and what disprofit ; under which latter head this of offending any of his fellow-creatures will surely not be forgotten. Nay, this may so swell the disprofit side of his account, that many an enterprise of biography otherwise promising shall require to be renounced. But once taken up, the rule before all rules is to do it, not to do the ghost of it. In speak- inof of the man and men he has to do with, he will of course keep all his charities about him, but all his eyes open. Far be it from him to set down aught imtrxie; nay, not to abstain from, and leave in oblivion, much that is true. But having found a thing or things essential for his subject, and well computed the for and against, he will in very deed set down such thing or things, nothing doubting, leaving, we may say, the fear of God before his eyes, and no other fear whatever. Censure the biographer's prudence ; dissent from the computation he made, or agree with it ; be all malice of his, be all falsehood, nay be all offensive avoidable inaccuracy condemned and consumed ; but know that by this plan onb', executed as was possible, could the biogra^jher hope to make a biography ; and blame him not that he did what it had been the worst fault not to do. . . . The other censure of Scott being made un- heroic springs from the same stem, and is perhaps a still more wonderful fiower of it. Your true hero must have no features, but be a white, stainless, impersonal ghost hero ! But connected with this, PREFACE. XI there is an hypothesis now current that Mr. Lockhart at heart has a dislike to Scott, and has done his best in an underhand treacherous manner to dis-hero him ! Such hypothesis is actually current. He that has ears may hear it now and then — on which astound- ing hypothesis if a word must be said, it can only be an apology for silence. If jMr. Lockhart is fairly chargeable with any radical defect, if on any side his insight entirely fails him, it seems even to be in this, that Scott is altogether lovely to him, that Scott's greatness spreads out before him on all hands beyond reach of eye, that his very faults become beautiful, and that of his worth there is no measure.' I will make no comment on this passage further than to say that I have considered the principles here laid down by Carlyle to be strictly obligatory upon myself in dealing with his own remains. The free judgments which he passed on men and things were part of him- self, and I have not felt myself at liberty to suppress them. Eemarks which could injure any man — and very few such ever fell from Carlyle's lips — I omit, except where indispensable. Eemarks which are merely legitimate expressions of opinion I leave for the most part as they stand. As an illustration of his own wishes on this subject, I may mention that I consulted him about a passage in one of Mrs. Carlyle's letters describ- ing an eminent living person. Her judgment was more just than flattering, and I doubted the prudence of printing it. Carlyle merely said, ' It will do him no harm to know what a sensible woman thought of him.' As to the biography generally, I found that I could not myself write a formal Life of Carlyle within measur- xii PREFACE. able compass without taking to pieces his own Memoirs and the collection of Mrs. Carlyle's letters ; and this I could not think it right to attempt. Mr. Forster and John Carlyle having both died, the responsibility was left entirely to myself. A few weeks before Mr. Carlyle's death, he asked me what I meant to do. I told him that I proposed to publish the Memoirs as soon as he was gone — those which form the two volumes of the ' Reminiscences.' Afterwards I said that I would publish the letters about which I knew him to be most anxious. He gave his full assent, merely adding that he trusted everything to me. The Memoirs, he thought, had better appear immediately on his departure. He expected that people would then be talking about him, and that it would be well for them to have something authentic to guide them. These points being determined, the remainder of my task became simplified. Mrs. Carlyle's letters are a better history of the London life of herself and her husband than could be written either by me or by anyone. The connecting narrative is Carlyle's own, and to meddle with his work would be to spoil it. It was thus left to- me to supply an account of his early life in ^Scotland, the greater part of which I had written while he was alive, and which is contained in the present volumes. The publication of the letters will follow at no distant period. Afterwards, if I live to do it, I shall add a brief account of his last years, when I was in constant intercourse with him. It may be said that I shall have thus produced no- ' Life,' but only the materials for a ' Life.' That is true. But I believe that I shall have given, notwithstanding. PREFACE. XI n a real picture as far as it goes ; and an adequate estim- ate of Carlyle's work in this world is not at present possible. He was a teacher and a prophet in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled. Carlyle, like them, believed that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teaching are false. He has offered himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge ; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right ; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, v/ill take his place among the inspired seers, and he will shine on, another fixed star in the intellectual sky. Time only can show how this will be : cifiipai iniXoiiroi fj-dprvpic; co(^. 1826. iEr. 31 383 Chapter XXI.— A.D. 1S27. jEt. 32 407 Chapter XXII.- A.D. 1827. .Et. 32 433 ILLUSTRATIONS. Thomas Carlyle, a.d. 1849 Frontispiece Ecclefechan . . To face page 1 Mainhill . . ,, „ 35 ScoTSBRia ,, „ 343 LIFE OF THOMAS OARLYLE. CHAPTER I. The eiver Annan, rising above Moffat in Hartfell, descends from the mountains through a valley gradually widening and spreading out, as the fells are left behind, into the rich and well-cultivated district known as Annandale. Picturesque and broken in the upper part of its course, the stream, when it reaches the level country, steals slowly among meadows and undulating wooded hills, till at the end of forty miles it falls into the Solway at Annan town. Annandale, famous always for its pasturage, suffered especially before the union of the kingdoms from border forays, the effects of which were long to be traced in a certain wildness of disposition in the inhabitants. Dumfries- shire, to which it belongs, was sternly Cameronian. Stories of the persecutions survived in the firmhouses as their most treasured historical traditions. Camero- nian congregations lingered till the beginning of the present century, when they merged in other bodies of seceders from the established religion. VOL, I. 1 2 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. In its hard figlit for spiritual freedom Scotch Pro- testantism lost respect for kings and nobles, and looked to Christ rather than to earthly rulers ; but before the Reformation all Scotland was clannish or feudal ; and the Dumfriesshire yeomanry, like the rest, were organised under great nobles, whose pennon they followed, whose name they bore, and the remotest kindred with whom, even to a tenth generation, they were proud to claim. Among the families of the western border the Carlyles were not the least dis- tinguished. They were originally English, and were called probably after Carlisle town. They came to Annandale with the Bruces in the time of David the Second. A Sir John Carlyle was created Lord Carlyle of Torthorwald in reward for a beating which he had given the English at Annan. ]\Iichael, the fourth lord, signed the Association Bond among the Protestant lords when Queen Mary was sent to Lochleven, being the only one among them, it was observed, who could not write his name. Their work was rough. They were rough men themselves, and with the change of times their importance declined. The title lapsed, the estates were dissipated in lawsuits, and by the middle of the last century nothing remained of the Carlyles luit one or two households in the neighbourhood of Burnswark who had inherited the name either through I he adoption by their forefathers of the name of their leader, or by some descent of blood which had trickled down through younger sons.^ ' Wlion Ciivlylo hcp.aino fami/a';, ji Diiiiifrics aiiliiiuiiry Iract'd his ancestry -with apparent succciss through ten generations to the first Lord ANNANDALE NINETY YEARS AGO. 3 In one of these families, in a house which his father, who was a mason, had built with his own hands, Thomas Carlyle was born on December 4, 1795. Ecclefechan, where his father lived, is a small market town on the east side of Annandale, six miles inland from the Solway, and about sixteen on the great north road from Carlisle.^ It consists of a single street, down one side of which, at that time, ran an open brook. The aspect, like that of most Scotch towns, is cold, but clean and orderly, with an air of thrifty comfort. The houses are plain, that in which the Carlyles lived alone having pretensions to origin- ality. In appearance one, it is really double, a central arch dividing it. James Carlyle, Thomas Carlyl^'s father, occupied one part. His brother, who Was his partner in his trade, lived in the other. Of their ancestors they knew nothing beyond the second generation. Tradition said that they had been long settled as farmers at Buri'ens, the Eoman station at Middlebie (two miles from Ecclefechan). One of them, it was said, had been unjustly hanged on pre- text of border cattle-stealing. The case was so cruel that the farm had been given as some compensation to the widow, and the family had continued to possess it till their title was questioned, and they were turned Torthorwald. There was much laughter about it in the house in Cheyne Kow, but Carlyle was inclined to think on the whole that the descent was real. ' The usually received etymology of Ecclefechan is that it is the same as Kirkfcchan, Church of St. Fechanus, an Irish saint supposed to have come to Annandale in the seventh century ; but Fechan is a not unusual termination in Welsh, and means ^ small,' as in Llani'airfechan. 1—2 4 LIFE OF THO^rAS CARLYLE. out, by the Duke of Queensberry. Whether this story was true or not, it is certain that James Carlyle's grandmother lived at Middlebie in extreme poverty, and that she died in the early part of the last century, leaving two sons. Thomas, the elder, was a carpenter, worked for some time at Lancaster, came home after- wards, and saw the Highlanders pass through Eccle- fechan in 1745 on their way to England. Leaving his trade, he settled at a small farm called Brownknowe, near Burnswark Hill, and, marrying a certain Mary Gillespie, produced four sons and two daughters. Of these sons James Carlyle was the second. The house- hold life was in a high degree disorderly. Old Thomas Carlyle was formed after the border type, more given to fighting and wild adventure than to patient in- dustry. * He did not drink,' his grandson says, ' but he was a fiery man, irascible, indomitable, of the toughness and springiness of steel. An old mcarket brawl, called Ecclefechan dog-fight, in which he was a principal, survives in tradition to this day.'^ He was proud, poor, and discontented, leaving his family for the most part to shift for themselves. They were often without food or fuel ; his sons were dressed in breeks made mostly of leather. They had to scramble (Carlyle says scraffle) for tlicir \-cry clothes and food. They knit, they thatched for hire, tliey hunted. j\Iy father tried all these tliin,^'s almost in boyhood. Every dale and burngatc and clen,2:h of that district he had traversed seeking hares and the like, lie used to talk of these pilgrimages. Once I remember his gun-flint was tied ' This, it should be said, -was -written sixty j-cars ago. ANNANDALE NINETY YEARS AGO. 5 on with a hatband. He was a real hunter Hkc a wild Indian from necessity. The hare's flesh was food. Hareskins at sixpence each would accumulate into the purchase money of a coat. His hunting years were not useless to him. Misery was early training the rugged boy into a stoic, that one day he might be the assurance of a Scottish man. * Travelling tinkers,' ' Highland drovers,' and such like were occasional guests at Brownknowe. ' Sandy Macleod, a pensioned soldier who had served under Wolfe, lived in an adjoining cottage, and had stories to tell of his adventures.' Old Thomas Carlyle, not- withstanding his rough, careless ways, was not without cultivation. He studied * Anson's Voyages,' and in his old age, strange to say, when his sons were growing into young men, he would sit with a neighbour over the fire, reading, much to their scandal, the ' Arabian Nights.' They had become, James Carlyle especially, and his brother through him, serious lads, and they were shocked to see two old men occupied on the edge of the grave with such idle vanities. Eeligion had been introduced into the house through another singular figure, John Orr, the schoolmaster of Hoddam, who was also by trade a shoemaker. School- mastering in those days fell to persons of clever irregular habits, who took to it from taste partly, and also because other forms of business did not answer with them. Orr was a man of strong pious tendencies, but was given to drink. He would disappear for weeks into pothouses, and then come back to his friends shattered and remorseful. He, too, was a friend and visitor at Brownknowe, teaching the boys by day, sleeping in the room with them 6 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. at night, and discussing arithmetical problems with their father. From him James Carlyle gained such knowledge as he had, part of it a knowledge of the Bible, which became the guiding principle of his life. The efifect was soon visible on a remarkable occasion. While he was still a boy, he and three of his companions had met to play cards. There was some disagreement among them, when James Carlyle said that they were fools and worse for quarrelling over a probably sinful amusement. They threw the cards into the fire, and perhaps no one of the four, certainly not James Carlyle, ever touched a card again. Hitherto he and his brother had gleaned a subsistence on the skirts of settled life. They were now to find an entrance into regular occupa- tion. James Carlyle was bom in 1757. In 1773, when he was sixteen, a certain William Brown, a mason from Peebles, came into Annandale, became acquainted with the Carlyles, and married Thomas Carlyle's eldest daughter Fanny. He took her brothers as apprentices, and they became known before long as the most skilful and diligent workmen in the neighbourhood. James, though not the eldest, had the strongest character, and guided the rest. * They were noted for their brotherly affection and coherence.' They all prospered. They were noted also for their hard sayings, and it must be said also, in their early manhood, for ' hard strikings.' They were warmly liked by those near them ; ' by those at a distance they were viewed as something dangerous to meddle with, something not to be meddled with.' James Carlyle never spoke with pleasure of his young days, regarding them 'as days of folly, i)crhaps sinful PEASANT LIFE AT ECCLEFECHAN. 7 days ; ' but it was well known that he was strictly temperate, pure, abstemious, prudent, and industrious. Feared he was from his promptness of hand, but never aggressive, and using his strength only to put down rudeness and violence. ' On one occasion,' says Carl3de, ' a huge peasant was rudely insulting and defying the party my father belonged to. The other quailed, and he bore it till he could bear it no longer, but clutched his rough adversary by the two flanks, swung him with ireful force round in the air, hitting his feet against some open door, and hurled him to a distance, supine, lamed, vanquished, and utterly humbled. He would say of such things, " I am wae to think of it" — wae from repentance. Happy he who has nothing worse to repent of ! ' The apprenticeship over, the brothers began work on their own account, and with marked success ; James Carlyle taking the lead. He built, as has been already said, a house for himself, which still stands in the street of Ecclefechan. His brothers occupied one part of it, he himself the other ; and his father, the old Thomas, life now wearing out, came in from Brownknowe to live with them. James, perhaps the others, but James decisively, became an avowedly religious man. He had a maternal uncle, one Eobert Brand, whose advice and example influenced him in this matter. Brand was a ' vigorous religionist,' of strict Presbyterian type. From him James Carlyle received a definite faith, and made his profession as a ' Burgher,' a seceding sect which had separated from the Establishment as insufficiently in earnest for them. They had their humble meet- ing-house, ' thatched with heath ; ' and for minister a 8 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. certain Jolni Johnstone, from whom Carlyle himself learned afterwards his first Latin ; ' the priestliest man,' he says, ' I ever imder any ecclesiastical guise was privileged to look upon.' Tliis peasant union, this little heath-thatched house, this siiuple evan<2;elist, together constituted proiKTly the ' church ' of that district ; they were the blessing and the saving of many ; on me too their pious heaven-sent influences still rest and live. There was in those days a ' teacher of the jjcople.' He sleeps not far from my father who ])uilt his mouiunent in the Ecclefechan churchyard, the Teaelier and the Taught. Blessed, I again say, are the dead that die in the Lord. In 1791, having then a house of his own, James Carlyle married a distant cousin of the same name, Janet Carlyle. They had one son, John, and then she died of fever. Her long fair hair, which had been cut off in her illness, remained as a memorial of her in a drawer, into which the children afterwards looked with wondering awe. Two years after the husband married again INIargaret Aitken, ' a woman,' says Carlyle, ' of to me the fairest descent, that of the pious, the just, and the wise.' Her character will unfold itself as the story goes on. Thomas Carlyle was her first child, bom December 4, 179.5 ; she lived to see him at the height of his fame, known and honoured wherever the P^nglisli language was spoken. To her care * for body anfl soul ' he never ceased to say that ' he owed endless gratitude.' After Thomas came eight others, three sons and five daughters, one of whom, Janet, so called after the first wife, died when she was a few months old. EARLY MEMORIES. 9 The family was prosperous, as Ecclefechan working life understood prosperity. In one year, his best, James Carlyle made in his business as much as lOOi. At worst he earned an artisan's substantial wages, and was thrifty and prudent. The children, as they passed out of infancy, ran about barefoot, but \\ ere otherwise cleanly clothed, and fed on oatmeal, milk, and potatoes. Our Carlyle learned to read from his mother too early for distinct remembrance ; when he was five his father taught him arithmetic, and sent him with the other village boys to school. Like the Carlyles generally he had a violent temper. John, the son of the first marriage, lived usi^ally with his grandfather, but came occasionally to yisit his parents. Carlyle's earliest recollection is of throwing his little brown stool at his brother in a mad passion of rage, when he was scarcely more than two years old, breaking a leg of it, and * feeling for the first time the united pangs of loss and remorse.' The next impression which most affected him was the small round heap under the sheet upon a bed where his little sister lay dead. Death, too, he made acquaintance with in another memorable form. His father's eldest brother John died. * The day before his funeral, an ill-behaving servant wench lifted the coverlid from off his pale ghastly befilleted head to show it to some crony of hers, unheeding of the child who was alone with them, and to whom the sight gave a new pang of horror,' The grandfather followed next, closing finally his Anson and his 'Arabian Nights.' He had a brother whose adventures had been remark- able. Francis Carlyle, so he was called, had been apprenticed to a shoemaker. He, too, when his time lo LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. was out, had gone to England, to Bristol among other places, where he fell into drink and gambling. He lost all his money; one morning after an orgie he flung himself desperately out of bed and broke his leg. When he recovered he enlisted in a brig of war, distin- guished himself by special gallantry in supporting his captain in a mutiny, and was rewarded with the com- mand of a Solway revenue cutter. After many years of rough creditable service he retired on half-pay to his native village of Middlebie. There had been some family quarrel, and the brothers, though living close to one another, had held no intercourse. They were both of them above eighty years of age. The old Thomas being on his death-bed, the sea captain's heart relented. He was a grim, broad, fierce-looking man ; ' prototype of Smollett's Trunnion.' Being too unwieldy to walk, he was brought into Ecclefechan in a cart, and carried in a chair up the steep stairs to his dying brother's room. There he remained some twenty minutes, and came down again with a face which printed itself in the little Carlyle's memory. They saw him no more, and after a brief interval the old generation had disappeared. Amidst such scenes our Carlylc struggled through his early boyhood. It was not a joyful life (ho says) ; what life is ? yet a safe and quiet one, above most others, or any other I have wit- nessed, a wholesome one. We were taciturn rather than talkative, but if httlc was said that little had generally a meaning. More remarkable man than my father I have never met in ECCLEFECHAN MEETING HOUSE, ii my journey through life ; sterhng sincerity in thought, word, and deed, most quiet, but capable of blazing into whirlwinds when needful, and such a flash of just insight and brief natural eloquence and emphasis, true to every feature of it as I have never known in any other. Humour of a most grim Scandinavian type he occasionally had ; wit rarely or never — ^too serious for wit — my excellent mother with perhaps the deeper piety in most senses had also the most sport. No man of my day, or hardly any man, can have had better parents. The Sunday services in Mr. Johnstone's meeting- house were the events of the week. The congregation were ' Dissenters '/of a marked type, some of them coming from as far as Carlisle ; another party, and among these at times a little eager boy, known after- wards as Edward Irving, appearing regularly from Annan, ' their streaming plaids in wet weather hanging up to drip.' A man (Carlyle wrote in 18GG) who awoke to the belief that he actually had a soul to be saved or lost was apt to be found among the Dissenting people and to have given up attendance at Kirk. All dissent in Scotland is merely stricter adherence to the National Kirk in all points. Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now v»hcn I look back. Most figures of them in my time were hoary old men ; men so like evangelists in modern ^'esture and 'poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ' I have nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal clergy in any country in the world. . . . That poor temple of my childhood is more sacred to me than the biggest cathedral then extant could have been ; rude, rustic, bare, no temple in the world \s^% 12 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. more so ; but there were sacred lambencies, tongues of authentic flame which kindled what was best in one, what has not yet gone out. Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of those old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names, employments or precise dwelhng places 1 never knew, but whose portraits are yet clear to me as in a mirror. Their heavy-laden, patient, ever attentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away, wife aw^ay for ever, or, it might be, wdfe still there and constant like a shadow aud grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of these good people, their well saved coarse old clothes, tailed waistcoats down to mid-thigh — all this I occasionally see as with eyes sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them. Of one of these worshippers in the Ecclefechan meeting-house, ' tall, straight, very clean always, brown as mahogany, with a beard white as snow,' Carlyie tells the following anecdote : — Old David Hope [that was his name] lived on a little farm close l)y Solway shore, a mile or two east of Annan — a wet country with late harvests which are sometimes incredibly (litlicult to save — ten days continuously ])()uriiig, then a day, perhaps two days, of drought, })art of them, it may be, of roaring wind ; during which the moments are golden for you, aud jierhaps you had better work all night as presently there will be deluges again. David's stuff, one such morning, was all standing dry, ready to be saved still if he stood to it, which was much his intention. Breakfast, wholesome ECCLEFECIIAN MEETING HOUSE. 13 hasty porridge, was soon over, and next in course came family worship, what they call taking the book, i.e. taking your Bibles, psalm and chapter always part of the service. David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in. ' Such a raging wind risen will drive the stocks (shocks) into the sea if let alone.' ' Wind ! ' answered David. Wind canna get ae straw that has been appomted mine. Sit doMTi and let us worship God.' 14 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. CHAPTER II. A..D. 1805. ^T. 10. Education is a passion in Scotland. It is the pride of every honourable peasant, if he has a son of any promise, to give him a chance of rising as a scholar. As a child Carlyle could not have failed to show that there was something unusual in him. The school- master in Ecclefechan gave a good account of his progress in * figures.' The minister reported favour- ably of his Latin. ' I do not grudge thee thy schooling, Tom,' his father said to him one day, *now that thy uncle Frank owns thee a better arithmetician than himself.' It was decided that he should go to Annan Grammar School, and thence, if he prospered, to the University, with final outlook to the ministry. He was a shy thoughtful boy, shrinking generally from rough companions, but with the hot temper of his race. His mother, naturally anxious for him, and fearing perhaps the family tendency, extracted a promise befo/e parting with him that he would never return a blow, and, as might be expected, his first experiences of school were extremely miserable. Boys of genius are never well received by the common flock, and escape persecution only when they are able to defend themselves. ' Sartt)!- Kesiutus' is generally mytliic, but parts ANNAN SCHOOL. 15 are historical, and among them the account of the first launch of Teufelsdrockh into the Hinterschlag Gymnasium. Hinterschlag (smite behind) is Annan. Thither, leaving home and his mother's side, Carlyle was taken by his father, being then in his tenth year, and ' fluttering with boundless hopes,' at Whitsuntide, 1805, to the school which was to be his first step into a higher life. Well do I remember (says Teufelsdrockh) the red sunny Whitsuntide morninsr when, trotting full of hope by the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street of the place and saw its steeple clock (then striking eight) and Schuld- thurin (jail) and the aproned or disaproned Burghers moving in to breakfast ; a Httle dog, in mad terror, was rushing past, for some human imps had tied a tin kettle to its tail, fit emblem of much that awaited myself in that mischievous den. Alas ! the kind beech rows of Entepf uhl (Ecclefechan) were hidden in the distance. I was among strangers harshly, at best indifferently, disposed to me ; the young heart felt for the first time quite orphaned and alone. . . . My school- fellows were boys, mostly rude boys, and obeyed the impulse of rude nature which bids the deer-herd fall upon any stricken hart, the duck-flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannise over the A\"eak. Carlyle retained to the end of his days a painful and indeed resentful recollection of these school experiences of his. ' This,' he said of the passage just quoted from ' Sartor,' ' is true, and not half the truth.' He had obeyed his mother's injunctions. He had courage in plenty to resent ill usage, but his promise i6 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. was sacred. He was passionate, and often, probably, violent, but fight he would not, and every one who knows English and Scotch life will understand what his fate must have been. One consequence was a near escape from drowning. The boys had all gone to bathe ; the lonely child had stolen apart from the rest, where he could escape from being tormented. He found himself in a deep pool which had been dug out for a dock and had been filled with the tide. The mere accident of someone passing at the time saved him. At length he could bear his condition no longer ; he turned on the biggest bully in the school and furiously kicked him ; a -battle followed in which he was beaten ; but he left marks of his fists upon his adversary, which were not forgotten. He taught his companions to fear him, if only like Brasidas's mouse. He was persecuted no longer, but he carried away bitter and angry recollections of what he had borne, which were never entirely obliterated. The teaching which Carlyle received at Annan, he says, ' was limited, and of its kind only moderately good. Latin and French I did get to read with fluency. Latin quantity was left a frightful chaos, and I had to learn it afterwards ; some geometry. Algebra, arithmetic tolerably well. Vague outlines cf geography I learnt; all the books I could get were also devoured. Greek consisted of the alphabet merely.' Elsewhere in a note I find the following ac.ou it of his first teaching and school experience : — My mother (writes Carlyle, in a scries of brief notes upon ANNAN SCHOOL. ly ^ his early life) had taught me reading. I never remember when. Tom Donaldson's school at Ecclefechan — a severely- correct kind of man Tom . . . from Edinburgh — went after- wards to Manchester ; I never saw his face again, though I still remember it well as always merry and kind to mc, though to the undeserving severe. The school then stood at Hoddam Kirk. Sandie Beattie, subsequently a Burgher minister at Glasgow, I well remember examining me. He reported me complete in English, age then about seven . . . that I must go to Latin or waste my time. Latin accordingly, with what enthusiasm ! But the schoolmaster did not him- self know Latin. I gradually got altogether swamped and bewildered under him. Eeverend Mr. Johnstone, of Eccle- fechan, or rather first liis son, home from college, and already teaching a nephew or aTcousin, had to take me in hand, and once pulled afloat I made rapid and sure way. In my tenth year I was sent to the grammar school at Annan. May 26, a bright sunny morning — Wliit-]\Ionday — which I still vividly remember, I trotting at my father's side in the way alluded to in ' Sartor.' It was a bright morning, and to me full of moment — of fluttering, boundless hopes, saddened by parting with mother, with home, and which afterwards were cruelly disappointed. ' Sartor ' is not to be trusted in details. Greek consisted of the Alphabet mainly. Hebrew is a German entity.^ No- body in that region except old Mr. Johnstone could have read a sentence of it to save his life. I did get to read Latin and French with fluency — Latin quantity was left a frightful chaos, and I had to learn it afterwards. Some geometry, algebra, arithmetic thoroughly well, vague outlines of geo- graphy, I did learn ; all the books I could get were also devoured. Mythically true is what 'Sartor' says of my • Alluding to a German biography in which Carlyle was said to have learnt Hebrew. VOL. I. 2 iS LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. schoolfellows, and not half the truth. Unspeakable is the damage and defilement I got out of those coarse unguided tyrannous cubs, especially till I revolted against them and gave stroke for stroke, as my pious mother, in her great love of peace and of my best interests, spiritually chiefly, had imprudently forbidden me to do. One way and another I had never been so wretched as here in that school, and the fn-st two years of my time in it still count among the miser- able of my life. Academia ! High School Instructore of Youth ! Oh, ye unspeakable ! Of holidays we hear nothing, though holidays there must have been at Christmas and Midsummer; little also of school friendships or amusements. For the last, in such shape as could have been found in boys of his class in Annan, Carlyle could have had little interest. He speaks warmly of his mathematical teacher, a certain Mr. Morley, from Cumberland, ' whom he loved much, and who taught him well.' He had formed a comradeship with one or two boys of his own age, who were not entirely uncongenial to him ; but only one incident is preserved which was of real moment. In his third school year Carlyle first consciously saw Edward Irving. Irving's family lived in Annan. He had him- self been at the school, and had gone thence to the University of Edinburgh. He had distinguished himself there, gained prizes, and was otherwise honourably spoken of. Annan, both town and school, was proud of the brilliant lad that they had produced; and Irving one day looked in upon the class room, the masters out of compliment attending him. ' He was scrupulously dressed, black coat, tight pantaloons, in the fashion of the day, and looked very neat, self-possessed, and FIRST SIGHT OF IRVING. 19 amiable ; a flourishing slip of a youth with coal-black hair, swarthy clear complexion, very straight on his feet, and, except for the glaring squint, decidedly handsome.' The boys listened eagerly as he talked in a free airy way about Edinburgh and its professors. A University man who has made a name for himself is infinitely admirable to younger ones ; he is not too far above them to be comprehensible. They know what he has done, and they hope distantly that they too one day may do the like. Of course Irving did not distinguish Carlyle. He walked through the rooms and disappeared. The Hinterschlag Grymnasium was over soon after, and Carlyle's future career was now to be decided on. The Ecclefechan family life was not favourable to dis- plays of precocious genius. Vanity was the last quality that such a man as James Carlyle would encourage, and there was a severity in his manner which effectively repressed any disposition to it. \Ye had all to complain (Carlyle says) that we dared nob freely love our father. His heart seemed as if walled in. My mother has owned to me that she could never understand lihn, and that her affection and admiration of him were obstructed. It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear repelled us from him, me especially. My heart and tongue played freely with my mother. He had an air of deepest gravity and even sternness. He had the most entire and open con- tempt for idle tattle — what he called clatter. Any talk that had meaning in it he could listen to ; what had no meaning in it, above all what seemed false, he absolutely could nob and would nob hear, bub al)ruptly burned from ib. Long may we remember his ' I don'b believe bhee ; ' his bongue- paralvsing cold iudifTercnb ' Hah.' 20 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. Besides fear, Carlyle, as lie grew older, began to ex- perience a certain awe of his father as of a person of altogether superior qualities. Xone of us (he ^ATites) will ever forj^et that bold glowinj]; style of his, flowing- free from the uiitutored soul, full of metaphor, thougli he knew not what metaphor was, Avith all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with surprising accuracy — brief, energetic, conveying the most perfect picture, definite, clear, not in ambitious colours, but in full white sunlight. Emi)hatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths ; his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. Such a father may easily have been alarming, and slow to gain his children's confidence. He had silently observed his little Tom, however. The reports from the Annan masters were all favourable, and when the question rose what was to be done with him, he inclined to venture the University. The wise men of Ecclefechan shook their heads. ' Educate a boy,' said one of them, 'and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents.' Others said it was a risk, it was waste of money, there was a large family to be provided for, too much must not be spent upon one, &c. James Carlyle had seen something in his boy's character which showed him that the risk, if risk there was, must be encountered ; and to Edinburgh it was decided that Tom should go and be made a scholar of. To English ears university life suggests splendid buildings, luxurious rooms, rich endowments as the reward of successful industry ; as students, young men between nineteen and twenty-three with handsome EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY. 21 allowance^, spending each of them on an average double the largest income which James Carlyle had earned in any year of his life. Universities north of the Tweed had in those days no money prizes to offer, no fellow- ships and scholarships, nothing at all but an education and a discipline in poverty and self-denial. The lads who went to them were the children, most of them, of parents as poor as Carlyle's father. They knew at what a cost the expense of sending them to college, relatively small as it was, could be afforded ; and they went with the fixed purpose of making the very utmost of their time. Five months only of each year they could remain in their classes ; for the rest of it they taught pupils themselves, or work^ on the farm at home to pay for their own learning. Each student, as a rule, was the most promising member of the family to which he belonged, and extraordinary confidence was placed in them. They were sent to Edinburgh, Glasgow, or wherever it might be, when they were mere boys of fourteen. They had no one to look after them either on their journey or when they came to the end. They walked from their homes, being unable to pay for coach-hire. They entered their own names at the college. They found their own humble lodgings, and were left en- tirely to their own capacity for self-conduct. The carriers brought them oatmeal, potatoes, and salt butter from the home farm, with a few eggs occa- sionally as a luxury. With their thrifty habits they required no other food. In the return cart their linen went back to their mothers to be washed and mended. Poverty protected them from temptations 22 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. to vicious amusements. They formed their economical friendships; they shared their breakfasts and their thoughts, and had their clubs for conversation or dis- cussion. When term was over they walked home in parties, each district having its little knot belonging to it ; and known along the roads as University scholars, they were assured of entertainment on the way. As a training in self-dependence no better education could have been found in these islands. If the teach- ing had been as good as the discipline of character, the Scotch universities might have competed with the world. The teaching was the weak part. There were no funds, either in the colleges or with the students, to provide personal instruction as at Oxford and Cambridge. The professors were individually excel- lent, but they had to teach large classes, and had no leisure to attend particularly to this or that promising pupil. The universities were opportunities to boys who were able to take advantage of them, and that was all. Such was the life on which Carlyle was now to enter, and such were the circumstances of it. It was the November term 1809. Pie was to be fourteen on the fourth of the approaching December. Edinburgh is nearly one hundred miles from Ecclefechan. He was to go on foot like the rest, under the guardianship of a boy named ' Tom Smail,' two or three years his senior, who had already been at college, and was held, therefore, to be a sufficient protector. How strangely vivid (he says in 18G6), liow remote and wonderful, tinged with the lines of far-off love ttiul sadness, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY. 23 is that journey to me now after fifty-seven years of time ! Sly mother and father walking with me in the dark frosty November morning through the village to set us on our way ; my dear ever loving mother, her tremulous affection, my &c. 'Tom Small' was a poor companion, very innocent, very conceited, an indifferent scholar. Carlyle in his own mind had a small opinion of him. The journey over the moors was a weary one, the elder lad stalking on generally ahead, whistling an Irish tune; the younger ' given up to his bits of reflections in the silence of the hills.' Twenty miles a day the boys walked, by Moffat and over Airock Stane. They reached Edinburgh ^arly one afternoon, got a lodging in Simon Square, got dinner, and sallied out again that 'Palinurus Tom' might give the novice a glance of the great city. The scene so entirely new to him left an impression on Carlyle which remained distinct after more than half a century. The novice mind (he says) was not excessively astonished all at once, but kept its eyes open and said nothing. What streets we went through I don't the least recollect, but have some faint image of St. Giles's High Kirk, and of the Luckcn booths there with their strange little ins and outs and cag:er old women in miniature shops, of coml)s, shoe-laces, and trifles ; stiU fainter image, if any, of the sublime horse statue in Parliament Square hard by ; directly after which Small, audaciously, so I thought, pushed open a door free to all the world and dragged me in with him to a scene which I have never forgotten. An immense hall dimly lighted from the top of the walls, and perliaps with candles burning in it here and there, all in strange chiaroscuro, and filled with what I 24 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. thonpfht exa'rs^cratively a thousand or two of human crcaturcp, all astir in a boundless buzz of talk, and simmering about in every direction — some solitary, some in groups. By degrees I noticed that some Aveve in wig and black gown, some not, but in common clothes, all well-dressed ; that here and there on the sides of the hall were little thrones with enclosures and steps leading up, red velvet figures sitting in said thrones, and the black-gowned eagerly speaking to them ; advocates pleading to judges as I easily understood. How they could be heard in such a grinding din was somewhat a mystery. Higher up on the walls, stuck there like swallows in their nests, sate other humbler figures ; these I found were the sources of certain wildly plangent lamentable kinds of sounds, or echoes, which from time to time pierced the universal noise of feet and voices, and rose unintelligibly above it as in the bitterness of incurable woe : criers of the court I gradually came to understand. And tliis was Themis in her ' outer house ; ' such a scene of chaotic din and hurly- burly as I had never figured before. It seems to me that there were four times or ten times as many people in that ' outer house ' as there now usually are ; and doubtless there is something of fact in this, such have been the curtailments and abatements of law practice in. the head courts since then, and transference of it to county jurisdiction. Last time I was in that outer house (some six or seven years ago in broad daylight) it seemed like a place fallen asleep, fallen almost dead. Notable figures, now all vanished utterly, were doubtless wandering about as part of that continual hurly-burly when I first set foot in it fifty-seven years ago ; great law lords this and that, great advocates alors ceVebres, as Thiers has it. Cranstoun, Cockburn, Jeffrey, Walter Scott, John Clerk. To me at that time they were not even names ; but I have since occasionally thought of that night and place where probably EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY. 25 tlicy were living substances — some of them in a kind of relation to me afterwards. Time with his tenses — what a miraculous entity is he always ! The only figure I distinctly recollect and got printed on my brain that night was John Clerk, there veritably hitching about, whose grim strong countenance with its black far-projecting brows, and look of great sagacity, fixed him in my memory. . This scone alone remains recorded of Carlyle's early Edinburgh experience. Of the University he says that he learned little there. In the Latin class he was under Professor Christieson, who ' never noticed him nor could distinguish him from another jNIr. Irvinor Carlyle, an older, bigger boy, with red hair, wild buck teeth, and scorched'complexion, and the worst Latinist of his accjuaintance.' In the classical field (he writes elsewhere) I am truly as nothing. Homer I learnt to read in the original with diffi- culty, after "Wolf's broad flash of light thrown into it ; ^schylus and Sophocles mainly in translations, Tacitus and Virgil became really interesting to me ; Homer and -3i]schylus above all ; Horace egoistical, lekliffortig, in sad fact I never cared for ; Cicero, after long and variou trials, always proved a windy person and a weariness to m ex- tinguished altogether by Middleton's excellent though mis- judging life of liim. It was not much better with philosophy. Dugald Stewart had gone away two years before Carlyle entered. Brown was the new professor, ' an eloquent acute little gentleman, full of enthusiasm about simple suggestions, relative, &c.,' unprofitable utterly to Carlyle, and 26 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. bewildering and dispiriting, as the autumn winds among withered leaves. In mathematics only he made real progress. His temperament was impatient of uncertainties. He threw himself with delight into a form of knowledge in which the conclusions were indisputable, where at each step he could plant his foot with confidence. Professor Leslie (Sir John Leslie afterwards) discovered his talent and exerted himself to help him with a zeal of which Carlyle never afterwards ceased to speak with gratitude. That he made progress in mathematics was ' perhaps,' as he says, due mainly to the accident that Leslie alone of my Pro- fessors had some genius in his business, and awoke a certain enthusiasm in me. For several years geometry shone before me as the noblest of all sciences, and I prosecuted it in all my best hours and moods. But far more pregnant inquiries were rising in me, and gradually engrossing me, heart as well as head, so that about 1820 or 1821 I had entirely thrown mathematics aside, and except in one or two brief spurts, more or less of a morbid nature, have never in the least regarded it farther. .-qV Yet even in mathematics, on ground with which he was familiar, his shy nature was unfitted for display. He earned off no prizes. He tried only once, and though he was notoriously superior to all his com- petitors the crowd and noise of the class room prevented him from even attempting to distinguish himself. I have heard him say late in life that his thoughts never came to him in proper form except when he was alone. UNIVERSITY TEACHING. 27 * Sartor Resartus,' I have already said, must not be followed too literally as a biographical authority. It is mythic, not historical. Nevertheless, as mythic it may be trusted for the general outlines. The university where I was educated (says Tcufelsdruckli) still stands vivid enough in my remembrance, and I know its name well, which name, however, I from tenderness to existing interests shall in no wise di\'Tilge. It is my painful duty to say that out of England and Spain ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered universities. This is indeed a time when right education is, as nearly as may be, im- possible ; however in degrees of -WTongness there is no limit ; nay, I can conceive a worse system than that of the Nameless itself, as poisoned victual may be worse than absolute hunger. It is written, when the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. Wherefore in such circumstances may it not sometimes be safer if both leader and led simply — sit still ? Had you anywhere in Crim Tartary walled in a square enclosure, furnished it with a small ill-chosen library, and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian strip- lings, to tumble about as they listed from three to seven years ; certain persons under the title of professors being stationed at the gates to declare aloud that it was a univer- sity and exact considerable admission fees, you had, not indeed in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect substance of our High Seminary. . . . The pro- fessors in the Nameless lived with ease, with safety, by a mere reputation constructed in past times — and then, too, Avith no great effort — by quite another class of persons ; which reputation, like a strong brisk-going undershot wheel sunk into the general current, bade fair, with only a little annual repainting on their part, to hold long together, and of its own accord assiduously grind for them. Happy that cS LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. it was so for tlic millers ! They themselves needed not to work. Their attempts at "working, what they called edu- cating, now when I look back on it fill me with a certain mute admiration. . . . Besides all this we boasted ourselves a rational university, in the higliest degree hostile to mysticism. Thus was the vounir vacant mind furuished with much talk about progress of the species, dark ages, prejudice and the like, so that all were quickly blo^\^l out into a state of windy argumentative- ness, whereby the better sort had soon to end in sick im- potent scepticism ; the worser sort explode in finished self-conceit, and to all spiritual interests become dead. . . . The hungry young looked up to their spiritual nurses, and for food were bidden eat the east wind. "What vain jargon of controversial metaphysics, etymology, and mechanical manipulation falsely named Science was current there, I indeed learnt better than perhaps the most. Among eleven hundred Christian youths there will not be wanting some eleven eager to learn. By collision with such, a certain warmth, a certain polish was communicated ; by instinct and by happy accident I took less to rioting than to thinking and reading, which latter also I was free to do. Nay, from the Chaos of that library I succeeded in fishing up more books than had been known to the keeper thereof. The foundation of a literary life was herel)y laid. I learned on my own strength to read fluently in almost all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and sciences. A certain ground-plan of human nature and life began to fashion itself in me, by additional experiments to be corrected aud in- definitely extended.^ The teaching at a university is but half what is learned there ; the other half, and tlie most important, ' Sartor Resarlus, book ii. chap. iii. COLLEGE STUDENT ERIENDS. 29 is what young men learn from one another. Carlyle's friends at Edinburgh, the eleven out of the eleven hundred, were of his own rank of life, sons of peasants who had their own way to make in life. From their letters, many of which have been preserved, it is clear that they were clever good lads, distinctly superior to ordinary boys of their age, Carlyle himself holding the first place in their narrow circle. Their lives were pure and simple. Nowhere in these letters is there any jesting with vice, or light allusions to it. The boys wrote to one another on the last novel of Scott or poem of Byron, on the ' Edinburgh Review,' on the war, on the fall of Napoleon, occasionally on geometrical problems, sermons, college exercises, and divinity lectures, and again on innocent trifles, with sketches, now and then humorous and bright, of Annandale life as it was seventy years ago. They looked to Carlyle to direct their judgment and advise them in difficulties. He was the prudent one of the party, able, if money matters went wrong, to help them out of his humble savings. He was already noted, too, for power of etfective speech — ' far too sarcastic for so young a man ' was what elder people said of him. One of his cor- respondents addressed him always as 'Jonathan,' or * Dean,' or ' Doctor,' as if he was to be a second Swift. Others called him Parson, perhaps from his intended profession. All foretold future greatness to him of one kind or another. They recognised that he was not like other young men, that he was superior to other young men, in character as well as intellect. ' Knowing how you abhor all affectation ' is an expression used to him when he was still a mere boy. 30 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE, His destination was ' the ministry,' and for tliis, knowing how much his father and mother wished it, he tried to prepare himself. He was ah-eady conscious, however, 'that he had not the least enthusiasm for that business, that even grave prohibitory doubts were gradually rising ahead. Formalism was not the pinch- ing point, had there been the preliminary of belief forthcoming.' ' Xo church or speaking entity whatever,' he admitted, ' can do without formulas, but it must beliftve them first if it would be honest.' Two letters to Carlyle from one of these early friends may be given here as specimens of the rest. They bring back the Annandale of 1814, and show a faint kind of image of Carlyle himself reflected on the \niter's mind. His name was Hill. He was about Carlyle's age, and subscribes himself Peter Pindar. To Thomas Carlyle. Castlebank : January 1, 1814. Wind SW. Weather hazy. What is the life of man ? Is it not to shift from trouhle to trouble and from side to side ? to button up one cause of vexation and unljuttou another ? So wrote the celebrated Sterne, so quoted the no less celebrated Jonathan, and so may the poor devil Pindar apply it to himself. You nieiitiou sonic two or three disappointments you have met with lately. For shame, Sir, to be so peevish and splenetic ! Your dis- appointments are ' trifles light as air ' when compared with the vexations and disappointments I have experienced. I was vexed and grieved to the very soul and beyond the soul, to go to Galloway and be deprived of the pleasure of — Sf>me- tliing you know nothing about, I was disajipointed on my return at finding her in a devil of a bad shy humour. 1 was LETTERS FROM FRIENDS. 31 — but why do I talk to you about such things ? There are joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, with which a Stoic Platonic humdrum bookworm sort of fellow like you, Sir, intcrmeddleth not, and consequently can have no idea of. I was disappointed in Bonaparte's escaping to Paris when he ought to have been taken prisoner by the allies at Leipsic. I was disappointed at your not mentioning anything about our old acquaintances at Edinburgh. Last night there was a flag on the mail, and to-night when I expected a Gazette announcing some great victory, the taking of Bayonne or the marching of Wellington to Bourdeaux, I was disappointed that the cause of all the rejoicing was an engagement with the French u/nder the walls of Bayonne, in which we lost upwards of 500 men killed and 3,000 wounded, and drew off the remainder of our army safe from the destroying weapons of the enemy. I was disappointed last Sunday, after I had got my stockings on, to find that there was a hole in the heel of one of them. I read a great many books at Kirk- ton, and was disappointed at finding faults in almost every one of them. I will be disappointed ; but what signifies e-oin"- on at this rate ? Unmixed happiness is not the lot of man — Of chanco aud cliaiigo, oh ! let not man complain, Else never, never, will ho cease to wail. The weather is dull ; I am melancholy. Good night. p,S, — j\Iy dearest Dean, — The weather is quite altered. The wind has veered about to the north. I am in good spirits, am happy. From the Scone. Castlchank : May 9. Dear Doctor, — T received yours last night, and a scurrilous, blackguarding, flattering, vexing, pernicked, humorous, 32 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer it piecemeal as a certain Honourable House does a speech from its Soverei*;^n, by cchoinjij back each syllable ? No. This won't do. Oh! how I envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an off- hand way, ever varyino; the scene with wit and mirth, wliile honest Peter must hold on in one numskull track to all eternity pureuing the even tenour of his way, so that one of Peter's lettere is as good as a thousand. You seem to take a friendly concern in my affaires de conir. By the bye, now, Jonathan, without telling you any particulars of my situation in these mattei*s, which is scarcely known to myself, can't I advise you to fall in love ? Grant- ing as I do that love is attended with sorrows, still. Doctor, these are amply compensated by the tendency that this tender passion has to ameliorate the heart, ' provided always, and be it further enacted,' that, chaste as Don Quixote or Don Quixote's horse, your heart never breathes a wish that angels may not register. Only have care of this. Dean, and fall in love as soon as you can — you will be the better for it. Pages follow of excellent criticism from Peter on Leyden's poems, on the Duke of Wellington, ]Miss Porter, &c. Carlyle has told him that he was looking for a subject for an epic poem. Peter gives him a tragi-comic description of a wedding at Middlebie, with the return home in a tempest, which he thinks will answer ; and concludes : — Your reflections on the fall of Napoleon bring to my mind an observation of a friend of mine the oth(.^i' dny. I was repeat- ing these lines in Shakespeare anil applying them to Bony — • But yesterday the Avord of Ca'sar niij,'ht Have stood against the world ; now lies ho there, And none so poor to do him reverence. COLLEGE STUDENT FRIENDS. 33 • Ay, very true,' quoth he ; ' the fallow could na be con- tent wi' niaist all Europe, and now he's glad o' Elba room.' Now, Doctor, let me repeat my instructions to you in a few words. Write immediately a very long letter ; write an epic poem as soon as may be. Send me some more ' remarks.' Tell me how you are, how you are spending your time in Edinburgh. Fall in love as soon as you can meet with a proper object. Ever be a friend to Pindar, and thou shalt always find one in the heart subdued, not subduing, Peter. In default of writings of his own, scarcely any of which survive out of this early period, such lineaments of Carlyle as appear through these letters are not with- out instructiveness. VOL. r. 34 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. CIIAPTEK III. A.D. 1814. JET. 19. Having finished liis college course, Carlyle looked out for pupils to maintain himself. The ministry was still his formal destination, but several years had still to elapse before a final resolution would be necessary — four years if he remained in Edinburgh attending lectures in the Divinity Hall; six if he preferred to be a rural Divinity student, presenting himself once in every twelve months at the University and reading a discourse. He did not wish to hasten matters, and, the pupil business being precarious and the mathe- matical tutorship at Annan falling vacant, Carlyle offered for it and was elected by competition in 1814. He never liked teaching. The recommendation of the place was the sixty or seventy pounds a year of salary, which relieved his father of further expense upon him, and enabled him to put l)y a little money every year, to be of use in future either to himself or his family. In other respects the life at Annan was only disagree- able. His tutor's work he did scrupulously well, but the society of a country town had no interest for him. He would not visit. He lived alone, shutting himself \\\) with his books, disliked the business more and more, and caTnc finally to hate it. Annan, associated as it was with the odious memories of his schooldays, had MAINHILL. 35 indeed but one merit — that he was within reach of his family, especially of his mother, to whom he was attached with a real passion. His father had by this time given up business at Ecclefechan, and had taken a farm in the neighbour- hood. The great north road which runs through the village rises gradually into an upland treeless grass country. About two miles distant on the left-hand side as you go towards Lockerby, there stands, about three hundred yards in from the road, a solitary low whitewashed cottage, with a few poor outbuildings attached to it. This is Mainhill, which was now for many years to be Carlyle's home, where he first learned G-erman, studied ' Faust ' in a dry ditch, and completed his translation of ' Wilhelm Meister.' The house itself is, or was when the Carlyles occupied it, of one story, and consisted of three rooms, a kitchen, a small bedroom, and a large one connected with the kitchen by a pas- sage. The door opens into a square farmyard, on one side of which are stables, on the other side opposite the door the cow byres, on the third a washhouse and dairy. The situation is high, utterly bleak and swept by all the winds. Not a tree shelters the premises ; the fences are low, the wind permitting nothing to grow but stunted thorn. The view alone redeems the dreariness of the situation. On the left is the great hill of Burnswark. Broad Annandale stretches in front down to the Solway, which shines like a long silver riband ; on the right is Hoddam Hill with the Tower of Repentance on its crest, and the wooded slopes which mark the line of the river. Beyond towers up Criffol, a)id in the far distance ^kiddaw, and ►Saddleback, and o -J 36 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. Helvellyn, and tlie High Cumberland ridges on the track of the Eoman wall. Here lived Carlyle's father and mother with their eight children, Carlyle himself spending his holidays with them ; the old man and his younger sons cultivating the sour soil and winning a hard-earned living out of their toil, the mother and daughters doing the household work and minding cows and poultry, and taking their turn in the field with the rest in hai'vest time. So two years passed away; Carlyle remaining at Annan. Of his own writing during this period there is little preserved, but his correspondence continued, and from his friends' letters glimpses can be gathered of his temper and occupations. He was mainly busy with mathematics, but he was reading incessantly, Hume's Essays among other books. He was looking out into the world, meditating on the fall of Napoleon, on the French Kevolution, and thinking much of the suffer- ing in Scotland which followed the close of the war. There were sarcastic sketches, too, of the families with which he was thrown in Annan. Robert Mitchell (an Edinliurgh student who had become master of a school at Ivuthwell) rallies him on ' having reduced the fair and fat academicians into scorched, singed, and shrivelled hags;' and hinting a warning 'against the temper with respect to this world which we are sometimes apt to entertain,' he suggests that young men like him and his correspondent 'ought to think how many are worse off" than they,' 'should be thankful for what they had, and not allow imagination to create unreal distress.' To another friend, Thomas Murray, author afterward^ COLLEGE FRIENDS. 37 of a history of Galloway, Carlyle had complained of his fate in a light and less bitter spirit. To an epistle written in this tone Murray replied with a description of Carlyle's style, which deserves a place if but for the fulfilment of the prophecy which it contains. I have had the pleasure of receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly letter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of expression, and an aifection- ate pathos, which indicate a pecuHar turn of mind, make sincerity doubly striking and wit doubly poignant. You flatter me with saying my letter was good ; but allow me to observe that among all my elegant and respectable corre- spondents there is none whose manner of letter-writing I so much envy as yours, A happy flow of language either for pathos, description, or humour, and an easy, graceful current of ideas, appropriate to every subject, characterise your style. This is not adulation ; I speak what I think. Your letters will always be a feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast ; and the time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these our juvende epistles will be read and probably applauded by a generation unborn, and that the name of Carlyle, at least, will be inseparably connected with the literary history of the nineteenth century. Generous ambi- tion and perseverance will overcome every difficulty, and our great Johnson says, 'Where much is attempted some- thing is performed.' You will, perhaps, recollect that when I convoyed you out of town in April, 1814, we were very sentimental : we said that few knew us, and still fewer took an interest in us, and that we Avould slip through the world inglorious and unknown. But the prospect is altered. We are probably as well known, and have made as great a figure, as any of the same standing at college, and we do not know, but wdl hope, what twenty years may bring forth. J 8 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. A letter from you every fortnight shall be answered faithfully, and will be highly delightful ; and if we live to be seniors, the letters of the companions of our youth will call to mind our college scenes, endeared to us by many tender associations, and will make us forget that we are poor and old, . . . That you may be always successful and enjoy every happiness that this evanescent world can afford, and that we may meet soon, is, my dear Carlyle, the sincere wish of Yours most faithfully, Thomas Murray. 5 Carnegie Street: July 27, 1S14. Murray kept Carlyle's answer to this far-seeing letter. Thomas Carlyle to TJtomas Murray. August, 18 1 4. Oh, Tom, Avhat a fooHsh flattering creature thou art ! To talk of future eminence in connection with the literary history of the nineteenth century to such a one as me ! Alas ! my good lad, when I and all my fancies and reveries and speculations shall have been swept over with the besom of oblivion, the literary history of no century will feel itself the worse. Yet think not, because I talk thus, I am careless of literary fame. No ; Heaven knows that ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune ! thou that givest unto each his portion in this dirty planet, bestow (if it shall please thee) coronets, and crowns, and principaUties, and purses, and pudding, and power upon the great and noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart of independence unyielding to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame ; and though starvation be my lot, I will smile tliat I have not been born a king. EDWARD IRVING. 39 But alas ! my dear Murray, what am I, or what are you, or what is any other poor unfriended striphng in the ranks of learning ? These college companions were worthy and innocent young men ; none of them, however, came to any very high position, and Carlyle's career was now about to intersect with the life of a far more famous contempo- rary who flamed up a few years later into meridian splendour and then disappeared in delirium. Edward Irving was the son of a well-to-do burgess of Annan, by profession a tanner. Irving was five years older than Carlyle ; he had preceded him at Annan School ; he had gone thence to Edinburgh University, where he had specially distinguished himself, and had been selected afterwards to manage a school at Haddington, where his success as a teacher had been again conspicuous. Among his pupils at Haddington there was one gifted little girl who will be hereafter much heard of in these . pages, Jane Baillie Welsh, daughter of a Dr. Welsh whose surgical fame was then great in that part of Scotland, a remarkable man who liked Irving and trusted his only child in his hands. The Haddington adventure had answered so well that Irving, after a year or two, was removed to a larger school at Kirk- caldy, where, though no fault was found with his teaching, he gave less complete satisfaction. A party among his patrons there thought him too severe with the boys, thought him proud, thought him this or that which they did not like. The dissentients re- solved at last to have a second school of their own, to be managed in a different style, and they applied to 40 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. the classical and mathematical professors at Edinburgh to recommend them a master. Professor Christieson and Professor Leslie, who had noticed Carlyle more than he was aware of, had decided that he was the fittest person that they knew of; and in the summer of 1816 notice of the offered preferment was sent down to him at Annan. He had seen Irving's face occasionally in Eccle- fechan church, and once afterwards, as has been said, when Irving, fresh from his college distinctions, had looked in at Annan school ; but they had no personal acquaintance, nor did Carlyle, while he was a master there, ever visit the Irving family. Of course, however, iie was no stranger to the reputation of their brilliant son, with whose fame all Annandale was ringing, and with whom kind friends had compared him to his own disadvantage. I (he says) had heard much of Irving all along, how dis- tinguished in studies, how splendidly successful as a teacher, how two professors had sent him out to Haddington, and how his new academy and new metliods were illuminating and astonishing everything there. I don't remember any malicious envy towards this great Irving of the distance for his greatness in study and learning. I certainly might have had a tendency hadn't I struggled against it, and tried to make it emulation. ' Do the like, do the like under difH- culties.' In the winter of 1815 Carlyle for the first time personally met Irving, and the beginning of the ac- quaintance was not promising. He was still pursuing his Divinity course. Candidates who could not attend KIRKCALD V. 41 the regular lectures at the University came up once a year and delivered an address of some kind in the Divinity Hall. One already — in the first year of his Annan mastership — he had given in an English sermon on the text * Before I was afflicted I went astray,' Sec. He calls it 'a weak flowery sentimental piece,' for which, liowever, he had been complimented ' by com- rades and professors.' His next was a discourse in Latin on the question whether there was or was not such a thing as ' Natural Religion.' This, too, he says was ' weak enough.' It is lost, and nothing is left to show the view which he took about the matter. But here also he gave satisfaction, and was innocently pleased with himself. It was on this occasion that he fell in accidentally with Irving at a friend's rooms in Edin- burgh, and there was a trifling skirmish of tongiie between them, where Irving found the laugh turned against him. A few months after came Carlyle's appointment to Kirkcaldy as Irving's quasi rival, and perhaps he felt a little uneasy as to the terms on which they might stand towards each other. His alarms, however, were pleasantly dispelled. He was to go to Kirkcaldy in the summer holidays of 1816 to see the people there and be seen by them before coming to a final arrange- ment. Adam Hope, one of the masters in Annan School, to whom Carlyle was much attached, and whose portrait he has painted, had just lost his wife. Carlyle had gone to sit with the old man in his sorrows, and unexpectedly fell in with Irving there, who had come on the same errand. 42 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. If (he says) I had been in doubts about his reception of me, he quickly and for ever ended them by a friendUness wliich on wider scenes might have been called chivalrous. At fii-st sight he heartily shook my hand, welcomed me as if I had been a valued old acquaintance, almost a brother, and before my leaving came up to me again and with the frankest tone said, ' You are coming to Kirkcaldy to look about you in a month or two. You know I am there ; my house and all that I can do for you is yours ; two Annandale people must not be strangers in Fife.' The doubting Thomas durst not quite believe all this, so chivalrous was it, but felt pleased and reheved by the fine and sincere tone of it, and thought to himself, ' "Well, it would be pretty.' To Kirkcaldy, then, Carlyle went with hopes so far improved. How Irving kept his word ; how warmly he received him ; how he opened his house, his library, his heart to him ; how they walked and talked together on Kirkcaldy Sands on the summer nights, and toured together in holiday time through the Highlands ; how Carlyle found in him a most precious and affectionate companion at the most critical period of his life — all this he has himself described. The reader will find it for himself in the Keminiscences which he has left of the time. Irving (he says) was four years my senior, the farila 2Jrinceps for success and reputation among the Edinburgh students, famed mathematician, famed teacher, first at Had- dington, then here, a flourishing man whom cross fortune was beginning to nibble at. He received me with open arms, and was a brother to me and a friend there and else- where afterwards — such friend as I never had again or before in this world, at heart constant till he died. KIRKCALDY. 43 I am tempted to fill many pages with extracted pictures of the Kirkcaldy life as Carlyle has drawn them. But they can be read in their place, and there is much else to tell ; my business is to supply what is left untold, rather than give over again what has been told aheady. 44 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. CHAPTER IV. A.D. 1817. ^T. 22. CoRREsrONDENCE with bis family had commenced and was regularly continued from the day when Carlyle went first to college. The letters, however, which are preserved begin with his settlement at Kirkcaldy. From this time they are constant, regular, and, from the care with which they have been kept on both sides, are to be numbered in thousands. Father, mother, brothers, sisters, all wrote in their various styles, and all received answers. They were 'a clannish folk ' holding tight together, and Carlyle was looked up to as the scholar among them. Of these letters I can give but a few here and there, but they will bring before the eyes the Mainhill farm, and all that was going on there in a sturdy, pious, and honourable Annandale peasant's household. Carlyle had spent his Christmas holidays 181G-17 at home as usual, and had returned to work. James Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle Mainhill: February 12, 1817. Dear Son, — I embrace this o])portunity of writing you a few lines with the carrier, as I had nothiiip^ to say that was worth postaj^e, having written to you largely the last time. Jiufc only I have reason to be tliaiikfiil tliat I can still tell you that we are all in good health, blessed be Cod for all his JAMES CARLYLE. \k, mercies towards us. Your mother has got your stockings ready now, and I think there are a few pairs of very good ones. Times is very bad here for labourers — work is no brisker and living is high. There have been meetings held by the lairds and farmers to assist them in getting meal. They propose to take all the meal that can be sold in tlie parish to Ecclefechan, for which they shall have full price, and there they sign another paper telling how much money they will give to reduce the price. The charge is given to James Bell, Mr. Miller, and William Graham to sell it. Mr. Lawson, our priest, is doing very well, and has given us no more paraphrases ; but seems to please every person that hears him, and indeed he is well attended every day. The sacrament is to be the first Sabbath of March, and he is visiting his people, but has not reached Mainhill. Your mother w\as very anxious to have the house done lief ore he came, or else she said she would run over the hill and hide her- self. Sandy^ and I got to work soon after you went away, built partitions, and ceiled — a good floor laid — and indeed it is very dry and comfortable at this time, and we are very snug and have no want of the necessaries of life. Our crop is as good as I expected, and our sheep and all our cattle living and doing very well. Your mother thought to have written to you ; but the carrier stopped only two days at home, and she being a very slow writer could not get it done, but she will write next opportunity. I add no more but your mother's compliments, and she sends you half the cheese that she w'as telling you about. Say in your next how your butter is coming on, and tell us when it is done and we will send you more. Write soon after you receive this, and tell us all your news and how you are coming on. I say no more, but remain, Dear son, your loving father, James Carlyle. ' Alexander Carlylo, the second son. 46 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. Thomas Carlyle to Mrs. Garlyle (Mainliill). Kirkciildy : March 17, 1817. ]\ry dear ]\Totlicr, — I liavc been long intending to write yon a line or two in order to let yon know my state and con- dition, bnt having nothing worth writing to connnnnicate I have put it off from time to time. There was little enjoy- ment for any person at ]\Iainhill when I w'as there last, hut I look forward to the ensuing autumn, w^hen I hope to have the happiness of discussing matters with you as we were wont to do of old. It gives me pleasure to hear that the bairns are at school. There are few things in this world more valuable than knowledge, and youth is the period for acquiring it. With the exception of the religious and moral instruction which I had the happiness of receiving from my parents, and which I humbly trust wull not be entirely lost upon me, there is nothing for which I feel more grateful than for the education which they have bestowed upon me. Sandy was getting fond of reading when he went aAvay. I hope he and Aitken^ will continue their operations now that he is at home. There cannot be imagined a more honest way of employing spare hours. ^ly way of life in this place is much the same as formerly. The school is doing pretty well, and my health through the w'inter has been uniformly good. I have little intercourse with the natives here ; yet there is no dryness between us. We are always happy to meet and happy to part ; but their ■ society is not very valuable to me, and my books are friends that never fail me. Sometimes I see the minister and some others of them, with whom I am very well satisfied, and Irving and I are very friendly ; so I am never wearied or at a loss to pass the time. I had designed this night to write to Aitkcn about his 'John AiLkcn Ciirlylc, the thinl hou, afterwards known as Jolin. MARGARET CARLYLE. 47 books and studies, but I will scarcely have time to say any- thing. There is a book for him in the box, and I would have sent him the geometry, but it was not to be had in the town. I have sent you a scarf as near the kind as Aitkcn's very scanty description would allow me to come. I hope it will please you. It is as good as any that the merchant had. A shawl of the same materials would have been warmer, Init I had no authority to get it. Perhaps you would like to have a shawl also. If you will tell me what colour you pre- fer, I will send it you with all the pleasure in the world. I expect to hear from you as soon as you can find leisure. You must be very minute in your account of your domestic nffairs. My father once spoke of a threshing machine. If twenty pounds or so will help him, they are quite ready at his service. I remain, dear mother, your affectionate son, Thojias Caelyle. Mrs. Carlyle could barely write at this time. She taught herself later in life for the pleasure of com- municating with her son, between whom and herself there existed a special and passionate attachment of a quite peculiar kind. She was a severe Calvinist, and watched with the most affectionate anxiety over her children's spiritual welfare, her eldest boy's above all. The hope of her life was to see him a minister — a ' priest ' she would have called it — and she was already alarmed to know that he had no inclination that way. Mrs. Garljl'. t) Thomas GcLrl;jU. Muiohill: June 10, 1817. Dear Son, — I take this opportunity of wr.'ting you a few lines, as you Avill get it free. I long to have a ci-ack,' and ' ramiliar talk. 48 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. look forward to August, trusting to sec thee once more, but in hope the meantime. Oh, Tom, mind tht' golden season of youth, and rememher your Creator in the days of your youth. Seek God while He may be found. Call upon Ilni while He is near. We hear that the world by wisdom knew not (}od. Pray for His presence with you, and His counsel to guide you. Have you got through the Bible yet ? If you have, read it again. I hope you Avill not weary, and may the Lord open your understanding. I have no news to tell you, but thank God we are all in our ordinary way. I hope you are well. I thought you would have written before now. I received your present and was very proud of it. I called it ' my son's venison.' Do write as soon as this comes to hand and tell us all your news. I am glad you are so contented in your place. We ought all to be thankful for our places in these distressing times, for I dare say they are felt keenly. We send you a small piece of ham and a minding of butter, as I am sure yours is done before now. Tell us about it in your next, and if anything is wanting. Good night, Tom, for it is a very stormy night, and I must away to the byre to milk. Now, Tom, be sure to tell me about your chapters. No more from Your old Minnie. The letters from the oIIkm- members of the family were sent equally regularly whenever there was an opportunity, and give between them a perfect picture of healthy rustic life at the Mainhill farm — the brothers and sisters down to the lowest all hard at work, the little ones at school, the elders ploughing. LIFE AT KIRKCALDY. ■ 49 reaping, tending cattle, or minding the dairy, and in the intervals reading history, reading Scott's novels, or even trying at geometry, which was then Carlyle's own favourite study. In the summer of 1817 the mother had a severe illness, by which her mind was affected. It was necessary to place her for a few weeks under restraint away from home — a step no doul)t just and necessary, but which she never wholly forgave, but resented in her own humorous way to the end of her life. The disorder soon passed off, however, and never returned. Meanwhile Carlyle was less completely contented with his position at Kirkcaldy than he had let his mother suppose. For one thing he hated school- mastering, and would, or thought he would, have pre- ferred to work with his hands ; while except Irving he had scarcely a friend in the place for whom he cared. His occupation shut him out from the best kind of society, which there, as elsewhere, had its exclusive rules. He was received, for Irving's sake, in the family of Mr. Martin, the minister; and was in some degree of intimacy there, liking Martin himself, and to some extent, but not much, his wife and daughters, to one of whom Irving had, perhaps too precipitately, become engaged. There were others also — Mr. Swan, a Kirk- caldy merchant, particularly — of whom he had a grate- ful remembrance ; but it is clear, both from Irving's letters to him and from his own confession, that he was not popular either there or anywhere. Shy and reserved at one moment, at another sarcastically self- asserting, with forces working in him which he did not himself understand, and which still less could bo VOL. I. 4 50 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. understood by others, he couhl neither properly accom- modate himself to the tone of Scotch provincial drawing- rooms, nor even to the business which he had especially to do. A man of genius can do the lowest work as well as the highest ; but genius in the process of developing, combined with an irritable nervous system and a fiercely impatient temperament, was not happily oc- cupied in teaching stupid lads the elements of Latin and arithmetic. Nor were matters mended when the Town Corporation, who were his masters, took upon them, as sometimes happened, to instruct or rebuke him. Life, however, even under these hard circumstances, was not without its romance. I borrow a passage from the ' Reminiscences ' : — Tlic Kirkcaldy population were a pleasant, honest kind of fellow mortals, something of quietly fruitful, of good old Scotch in their works and ways, more vernacular, peaceably fixed and almost genial in their mode of life, than I had been used to in the border home land. Fife generally we liked. Those ancient little burghs and sea villages, with their poor little havens, salt-pans and weather-beaten bits of Cyclopean breakwatci's, and rude innocent machineries, are still kindly to me to think of. Kirkcaldy itself had many looms, had Baltic trade, whale fishery, &c., and was a solidly diligent and yet by no means a panting, puffing, or in any way gambling ' Lang Toun.' Its flax-mill machinery, T remember, was turned mainly by wind ; and curious blue-painted wheels with oblique vans rose from many roofs for that end. We, I in particular, always rather liked the people, though from the distance chiefly, chagrined and discouraged by the sad trade one had. Some hospitable human fire sides I found, FIRS T ROMANCE. 5 1 and these were at intervals a fine little element ; bnt in general we were bnt onlookers, the one real society our books and our few selves. Not even with the bright young ladies (which was a sad feature) were we generally on speaking terms. By far the brightest and cleverest, however, an ex- pupil of Irving's, and genealogically and otherwise, being poorish and well-bred, rather a kind of alien in the place, I did at last make some acquaintance with — at Irving's first, I think, though she rarely came thither — and it might easily have been more, had she and her aunt and our economics and other circumstances liked. She was of the fair-complexioned, softly elegant, softly grave, witty and comely type, and had a good deal of gracefulness, intelligence, and other talent. Irving, too, it was sometimes thought, found her very in- teresting, could the Miss Martin bonds have allowed, which they never would. To me, who had only known her for a few mouths, and who within a twelve or fifteen months saw the last of her, she continued, for perhaps three years, a figure hanging more or less in my fancy, on the usual romantic, or latterly quite elegiac and silent terms, and to this day there is in me a good will to her, a candid and gentle juty, if needed at all. She was of the Aberdeenshire Gordons, Margaret Gordon, born I think in New Bruns- wick, where her father, probably in some official post, had died young and poor ; her accent was prettily English, and her voice very fine. An aunt (widow iii Fife, cliildless with limited resources, but of frugal cultivated turn ; a lean proud elderly dame, once a Miss Gordon herself ; sang Scotch songs beautifully, and talked shrewd Aberdecnish in accent and otherwise) had adopted her and brought her hither over seas ; and here, as Irving's ex-pupil, she now, cheery though with dim outlooks, was. Irving saw her again in Glasgow one summer tour- ing, &c. ; he himself accompanying joyfully — not joining, so 4—2 52 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. I understood it, the retinue of suitors or potential suitoi's ; rather perhaps indicating gently ' No, I must not.' A year or so after we heard the fair ]\Iargaret had married some rich Mr, Something, who afterwards got into Parliament, thence out to 'Xova Scotia' (or so) as governor, and I heard of her no more, except that lately she was still living childless as the 'dowager lady,' her Mr. Something having got knighted before dying. Poor ]\Iargaret ! I saw her recognisably to me hei'c in her London time, 1840 or so, twice ; once with her maid in Piccadilly promenading — little altered ; a second time that same year, or next, on horseback bjth of us, and meeting in the gate of Hyde Park, when her eyes (but that was all) said to me almost touchingly, yes, yes, that is you. Margaret Gordon was the original, so far as there was an original, of Blumine in ' Sartor Resartus.' Two letters from her remain among Carlyle's papers, which show that on both sides their regard for each other had found expression. Circumstances, however, and the unpromising appearance of Carlyle's situation and prospects, forbade an engagement between them, and acquit the aunt of needless harshness in peremptorily putting an end to their acquaintance. Miss Gordon took leave of him as a ' sister ' in language of affec- tionate advice. A single passage may be quoted to show how the young unknown Kirkcaldy schoolmaster appeared in the eyes of the young high-born lady who had thus for a moment crossed his path. And now, my dear friend, a long long adieu : one advice, and as a parting one consider, value it. Cultivate the milder dispositions of vour heart. Subdue the more extravagant FIRST ROMANCE. 53 visions of the brain. Tn time your abilities must be known. Among your acquaintance they are ah'eady beheld with wonder and delight. By those whose opinion will be valuable, they hereafter will be appreciated. Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved ! Remove the awful distance between you and ordinary men by kind and gentle manners. Deal gently with their inferiority, and be con- vinced they will respect you as much and like you more. Why conceal the real goodness that flows in your heart ? I have ventured this counsel from an anxiety for your future welfare, and I would enforce it with all the earnestness of the most sincere friendship. Let your light shine before men, and think them not unworthy the trouble. This exer- cise will prove its own reward. It must be a pleasing thing to live in the affections of others. Again adieu. Pardon the freedom I have used, and when you think of me be it as a kind sister, to whom your happiness will always yield deMght, and your griefs sorrow. Yours, with esteem and regard, I give you not my address because I dare not promise to see you. 54 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. CIIArTER V. A.D. 1818. ^T. 23. Caklyle had by this time abandoned the thought of the ' ministry ' as his possible future profession — not with- out a struggle, for both his father's and his mother's hearts had been set upon it ; but the * grave pro- hibitive doubts ' which had risen in him of their own accord had been strengthened by Gibbon, whom he had found in Irving's lil)rary and eagerly devoured. Never at any time had he ' the least inclination ' for such an office, and his father, though deeply disappointed, was too genuine a man to offer the least remonstrance.^ The * schoolmastering ' too, after two years' experience of it, became intolerable. His disposition, at once shy and defiantly proud, had perplexed and displeased ' ' With mo, ' he says in a private note, ' it was ncv(?r much in favour, though my parents silently much wished it, as I knew well. Finding I had objections, my father, with a niagnaniniity which I admired and admire, left me frankly to my own guidance in that matter, as did my mother, perhaps still more lovingly, though not so silently; and tho theological course which could ho prosecuted or kept open by appearing annually, putting down your name, but with some trifling fee, in the register, and then going your way, was, after perhaps two years of this languid form, allowed to close itself for good. I remember j'et being on the street in Argjdl .Square, Edinburgh, probably in 1817, and como over from Kirkcaldy with some intent, the languidest possible, still to put down my name and fee. Tho official person, when I rung, was not at homo, and my instant feeling was, "Very good, then, very good ; let this be Finis in tho matter," and it really was.' IRVING AT KIRKCALDY. 55 the Kirkcaldy burghers. Both he and Irving also fell into unpleasant collisions with them, and neither of the two was sufficiently docile to submit tamely to reproof.^ An opposition school had been set up which drew off the pupils, and finally they both concluded that they had had enough of it — ' better die than be a schoolmaster for one's living ' — and would seek some other means of supporting themselves. Carlyle had passed his summer holidays as usual at Mainhill (1818), where he had perhaps talked over his prospects with his family. On his return to Kirkcaldy in September he wrote to his father explaining his situation. He had saved about 90L, on which, with his thrifty habits, he said that he could support him- self in Edinburgh till he could ' fall into some other ' Carlyle says in the Reminiscences that Irving was accused of harsh- ness to the boys. Kirkcaldy tradition has preserved instances of it, which sound comical enough at a distance, but were no matter of laughter to the sufferers. A correspondent writes to me: — 'Irving has the reputation to this day of being a very hard master. Ho thrashed the boys frequently and unmercifully. A story in illustration was told me. A carpenter, a bit of a character, whose shop was directly opposite Irving's school, hearing a fearful howling one day, rushed across, axe in hand, drove up the door, and to Irving's query what he did there, replied, "I thocht ya were killin' the lad, and cam' over tae see if ye were needin' help." Carlyle, on the contrary, I was assured, never lifted his hand to a scholar. Still he had perfect com- mand over them. A look or a word was sufficient to command attention and obedience. Nor have I ever heard that this command was attri- butable to fear. So far as I can learn, it was entirely due to the respect which he seems to have obtained from the first.' There is some truth in these legends of Irving's severity, for Carlyle himself admits it. But tradition always tends to shape stories and characters into an artistic completeness which had no real existence. The authentic evidence of Irving's essential kindness and affectionate gentleness makes it impossible o^jbclicve that he was ever wantonly or carelessly cruel. 56 LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. way of doing.' He could perhaps get a few mathe- matical pupils, and meantime could study for the har. He waited only for his father's approval to send in his resignation. The letter was accompanied by one of his constant presents to his mother, who was again at home, though not yet fully recovered. Joltn Garlyle to Thomas Garlyle. Mainhill : September IG, 1818. Dear Brother, — "We received yours, and it told us of your safe arrival at Kirkcaldy. Our mother has grown better every day since you left us. She is as steady as ever she was, has been upon haystacks three or four times, and has been at church every Sabbath since she came home, behaving always very decently. Also she has given over talking and singing, and spends some of her time consulting Ralph Erskine. She sleeps every night, and hinders no person to sleep, but can do with less than the generality of people. In fact we may conclude that she is as wise as could be expected. She has none of the hypocritical mask with which some people clothe their sentiments. One day, having met Agg Byers, she says : ' AVccl, Agg, lass, I've never spoken t'ye sin ye stole our coals. I'll gie ye an advice : never steal nac more.' Alexander Garlyle to Thomas Garlyle. Septoii)I)ci- 18, 1S18. My dear Brother, — We were glad to hear of your having arrived in safety, thoniijli your prospects were not brilUant. My father is at Ecclefcchan to-day at a market, but l)efore he went he told me to mention that witli regard to his advising you, he Avas unable to give you any advice. He thought it might be necessary to consult Leslie before you RETURN TO EDINBURGH. 57 gave up, but you might do what seemed to you good. Had my advice any weight, I would advise you to try tlie law. You may think you have not money enough to try that, but with what assistance we could make, and your own industry, I think there would be no fear but you would succeed. The box which contained my mother's bonnet came a day or two ago. She is very well pleased with it, though my father thought it too gaudy ; but she proposes ^vriting to you her- self. The end was, that when December came Carlyle and Irving ' kicked the schoolmaster functions over,' removed to Edinburgh, and were adrift on the world. Irving had little to fear ; he had money, friends, reputa- tion ; he had a profession, and was waiting only for ' a call ' to enter on his full privileges. Carlyle was far more unfavourably situated. He was poor, unpopular, comparatively unknown, or, if known, known only to be feared and even shunned. In Edinburgh ' from my fellow-creatures,' he says, ' little or nothing but vinegar was my reception when we happened to meet or pass near each other — my own blame mainly, so proud, shy, poor, at once so insignificant-looking and so grim and sorrowful. That in " Sartor " of the worm trodden on and proving a torpedo is not wholly a fable, but did actually befall once or twice, as I still with a kind of small, not ungenial, malice can remember.' He had, however, as was said, nearly a hundred pounds, which he had saved out of his earnings ; he had a consciousness of integrity worth more than gold to him. He had thrifty self-denying habits which made him content with the barest necessaries, and he resolutely faced his position. His family, though silently disapproving the 58 LIFE or THOMAS CARLYLE. step wliicTi he bad taken and necessarily anxious about him, rendered what help they could. Once more the Ecclefechan carrier brought up the weekly or monthly supplies of oatmeal, cakes, butter, and, when needed, under garments, returning with the dirty linen for the mother to wash and mend, and occasional pre- sents which were never forgotten ; while Carlyle, after a thought of civil engineering, for which his mathematical training gave him a passing inclination, sate down seriously, if not very assiduously, to study Jaw. liCtters to and from Ecclefechan were constant, the carrier acting as ]jostman. Selections from them bring the scene and characters before the reader's eyes. Sister Mary, then twelve years old, writes : — I take this opportunity of scndinj^ yon this scrawl. I f?ofc the hat you sent with 8audy [brother Alexander], and it fits very well. It was far too good ; a Avorsc would have done very avcII. Boys and I are employed this winter in waiting on the cattle, and are going on very well at present. I generally write a copy every night, and read a little in the ' Cottagers of (Tlenburnie,' or some such like ; and it shall ho my earnest desire never to imitate the abominable slntterics of j\Irs. Maclarty. The remarks of the author, Mrs. Hamil- ton, often l)ring your neat ways in my mind, and I hope to be benefited by them. In the mean time, I shall endeavour to be a good girl, to be kind and obedient to my parents, and obliging to my brothers and sisters. You will write rae a lon