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His destination was the ministry," and for this, knowing how much his father and mother wished it, he tried to prepare himself. He was already conscious, however, "that he had not the least enthusiasm for that business, that even grave prohibitory doubts were gradually rising ahead. It has been supposed that he disliked the formalism of the Scotch Church; but formalism, he says, was not the pinching point, had there been the preliminary of belief forthcoming. "No church or speaking entity whatever can do without formulas, but it must believe them first if it would be honest.

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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 writer's mind. His name was Hill. He was about Carlyle's age, and subscribes himself Peter Pindar.

To T. Carlyle.

46

For

CASTLEBANK, Jan. 1, 1814. Wind S.W. Weather hazy. What is the life of man? Is it not to shift from trouble to trouble and from side to side? to button up one cause of vexation and unbutton 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 mention some two or three disappointments you have met with lately. shame, sir. to be so peevish and splenetic! Your disappointments 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 something you know nothing about. I was disappointed on my return at finding her in a devil of a bad shy humor. was-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, intermeddleth 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 under the walls of Bayonne, in which we lost upward of 500 men killed and 3000 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 Kirkton, and was disappointed at finding faults in almost every one of them. I will be disappointed; but what signifies going on at this rate? Unmixed happiness is not the lot of man-

"Of chance and change, oh! let not man complain, Else never, never, will he cease to wail."

The weather is dull; I am melancholy. Good night.

P.S.-My dearest Dean-The weather is

quite altered. The wind has veered about to the north. I am in good spirits, am happy.

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From the same.

CASTLEBANK, May 9, 1814. DEAR DOCTOR: I received yours last night, and a scurrilous, blackguarding, flattering, vexing, pernicked, humorous, witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer it piecemeal as a certain Honorable House does a speech from its Sovereign, by echoing back each syllable? No. This won't do. Oh how I envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an offhand way, ever varying the scene with wit and mirth, while honest Peter must hold on in one numbskull track to all eternity pursuing the even tenor of his way, so that one of Peter's letters is as good as a thousand.

You seem to take a friendly concern in my affaires de cœur. By the bye, now, Jonathan, without telling you any particulars of my situation in these matters, which is scarcely known to myself, can't I advise you to fall in love? Granting as I do that it 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, etc. Carlyle has told him that he was looking for a subject for an epic poem. Peter gives him a tragic-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 other day. I was repeating these

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Aye, very true," quote he; "the fallow could na be content wi' maist all Europe, and now he's glad o' Elba room.'

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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, none of which survive out of this early period, such lineaments of Carlyle as appear through these letters are not without instructiveness.

Having finished his 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 mathematical 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 by 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 disagreeable to him. 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 up with his books, disliked the business more and more, and came finally to hate it.

Annan had indeed but one recommendation 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

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business at Ecclefechan, and had taken a farm in the neighborhood. 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 toward Lockerby, there stands, about three hundred yards in from. the road, a solitary low whitewashed house, 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 German, 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 by a passage. The door opens into a square farmyard, on one side of which are stables, on the 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 house; 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. 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 Hoddam towers up Criffel, and in the far distance Skiddaw, and Saddleback, and Helvellyn, and the high Cumberland ridges, on the track of the Roman 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 it, the mother and daughters doing the household work and minding cows and poultry, and taking their turn in the field with the rest in harvest time.

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among other books. He was looking
out into the world, meditating on the
fall of Napoleon, on the French Revo-
lution, 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 and the neigh-
borhood. Robert Mitchell (an Edin-
burgh student who had become master
of a school at Ruthwell) rallies him on
"having reduced the fair and fat acad-
emicians into scorched, singed, and
shrivelled hags ;" and hinting a warn-
ing" 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 should not allow
imagination to create unreal distresses."
To another friend, Thomas Murray,
author afterward of a history of Gallo-
way, Carlyle had complained of his fate
in a light and less bitter spirit. To an
epistle written in this tone Murray re-
plied with a description of Carlyle's
style, which deserves a place if but for
the fulfilment of the prophecy which it
contains.

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inglorious and unknown. But the prospect is

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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 will hope, what twenty years may bring forth.

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.

These college companions were worthy and innocent young men; none of them, however, came to much, and Carlyle's career was. now about to intersect with a life of a far more famous contemporary who flamed up a few years later into meridian splendor 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 then to Edinburgh University, where he had specially distinguished himself, and had been selected afterward to manage a school at Haddington, where his success as a teacher had been again con5 CARNEGIE STREET, July 27, 1816. spicuous. Among his pupils at HadI have had the pleasure of receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly let- dington there was one gifted little girl ter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shan- who will be hereafter much heard of in dean turn of expression, and an affectionate these pages, Jane Baillie Welsh, daughter pathos which indicate a peculiar turn of mind, of a Doctor Welsh, whose surgical fame make sincerity doubly striking and wit doubly was then great in that part of Scotland, poignant. You flatter me with saying my letter was good; but allow me to observe that a remarkable man who liked Irving and among all my elegant and respectable corre- trusted his only child in his hands. The spondents there is none whose manner of letter- Haddington adventure had answered so writing I so much envy as yours. A happy well that Irving, after a year or two, flow of language either for pathos, description, was removed to a larger school at Kirkor humor, and an easy, graceful current of ideas appropriate to every subject, characterize caldy, where, though no fault was found your style. This is not adulation; I speak with his teaching, he gave less complete what I think. Your letters will always be a satisfaction. A party among his patrons feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast; there thought him too severe with the and the time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these our juvenile epistles boys, thought him proud, thought him will be read and probably applauded by a genthis or that which they did not like. eration unborn, and that the name of Carlyle, The dissentients resolved at last to have at least, will be inseparably connected with the a second school of their own to be manliterary history of the nineteenth century. aged in a different fashion, and they apGenerous ambition and perseverance will overcome every difficulty, and our great Johnson plied to the classical and mathematical says, Where much is attempted something is professors at Edinburgh to recommend performed." You will, perhaps, recollect that them a master. Professor Christieson when I conveyed you out of town in April, and Professor Leslie, who had noticed 1814. we were very sentimental; we said that few knew us, and still fewer took an interest Carlyle more than he was aware of, had in us, and that we would slip through the world decided that he was the fittest person

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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 Ecclefechan Church, and once afterward, when Irving, fresh from his college distinctions, had looked in upon Annan School; but they had no personal acqaintance, nor did Carlyle, while he was a master there, ever visit the Irving family. Of course, however, he 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 distinguished in studies, how splendidly successful as a teacher, how two professors had sent him out to Haddington, and how this new academy and new methods were illuminating and astonishing everything there. I don't remember any malicious envy toward 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 difficulties.'

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In the winter of 1815 Carlyle for the first time personally met Irving, and the beginning of the acquaintance was not promising. He was still pursuing his Divinity course. Candidates who could not attend the regular lectures at the University came up once a year and delivered an address of some kind in the Divinity Hall. One already he had given in the first year of his Annan mastership-an English sermon on the text Before I was afflicted I went astray," etc. He calls it "a weak flowery sentimental piece," for which, however, he had been complimented "by comrades 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. was on this occasion that he fell in accidentally with Irving at a friend's rooms. in Edinburgh, and there was a trifling skirmish of tongue between them, where Irving found the laugh turned against

him.

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A few months after came Carlyle's

His

appointment to Kirkcaldy as Irving's quasi rival, and perhaps he felt a little uneasy as to the terms on which they might stand toward each other. 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 arrangement. 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.

If (he says) I had been in doubts about his reception of me, he quickly and forever ended them by a friendliness which on wider scenes might have been called chivalrous. At first 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 relieved by the fine and sincere tone of it, and thought to himself, Well, it would be pretty."

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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 Carlyle has himself described. The reader will find it for himself in the reminiscences of Edward Irving.

Irving (he says) was four years my senior, the facile princeps for success and reputation among the Edinburgh students, famed mathematician, famed teacher, first at Haddington, 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 elsewhere afterwardsuch friend as I never had again or before in this world, at heart constant till he died.

I am tempted to fill many pages with extracted pictures of the Kirkcaldy life,

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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 again what has been told already.

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Correspondence with his 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, brother, 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 flower of the whole flock. 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 honorable Annadale peasant's household. Carlyle had spent his Christmas holidays 1816-17 at home as usual, and had returned to work.

James Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle.

MAINHILL, Feb. 12, 1817.

DEAR SON: I embrace this opportunity of writing you a few lines with the carrier, as I had nothing to say that was worth postage, having written to you largely the last time. But only I have reason to be thankful that I can still tell you that we are all in good health, blessed be God for all his mercies toward 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 laborerswork 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 the 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 was very anxious to have the house done before he came, or else she said she would run over the hill and hide herself. Sandy (Alexander Carlyle, the second son) 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. Out 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 was telling you about. Say in your next how your brother 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. Thomas Carlyle to Mrs. Carlyle (Mainhill). KIRKCALDY, March 17, 1817.

MY DEAR MOTHER: I have been long intending to write you a line or two in order to let you know my state and condition, but having nothing worth writing to communicate I have put it off from time to time. There was little enjoyment for any person at Mainhill when I was there last, but I look forward to the ensuing autumn, when 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 will not be entirely lost upon me, there is nothing for which I feel more grateful than for the education which they have bestowed upon Sandy was getting fond of reading when he went away. 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.

me.

My way of life in this place is much the same as formerly. The school is doing pretty well, and my health through the winter 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 Sometimes I see the minister and some

me.

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 Aitken about his books and studies, but I will scarcely have time to say anything. 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 Aitken'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

* John Aitken Carlyle, the third son, afterward known as John.

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