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further instruction was deemed necessary. This was his mother's wish; the father at first thought he should gang and work,' but he soon joined his wife in the desire to see oor Tam wag his pow in the pu'pit.' The mother obtained by her personal solicitations the further instruction from her minister's son, young Mr. Johnston, an advanced student from Edinburgh University. Three months hard grinding laid the foundation of his mathematical studies, and furnished him with the key to the intricacies of Latin, grammar, and construction. Soon Virgil and Horace became friends well known. From the care of Mr. Johnston he passed on to the higher tuition of Adam Hope, whom he so graphically portrays in the reminiscences. In this Burgh Academy at Annan he made such rapid progress in mathematical and classical studies that it was his old schoolmaster's opinion that he should go to college. At that time lads went young to Scottish Universities. Carlyle said, in his Rectoral Address, that he was barely fourteen when he matriculated at Edinburgh. There appears to be no evidence as to the length of his student's term, but as he passed through the arts curriculum and took two sessions in the theological course, he must have been there six years. None of the able professors of that day appear to have won his sympathy or commanded his admiration except Sir J. Leslie, who filled the mathematical chair. During his student's career he seems to have made but few friends; he dwelt apart from the active pursuits of the young men around him. He was a voracious reader, laying all the libraries he could command under tribute, thus acquiring knowledge outside and beyond the college course. His one companion and friend was Edward Irving, who was then, like himself, an enthusiastic student of literature and mathematics, and who was, like himself, an omnivorous reader. So well-grounded and thorough was his proficiency in mathematical science, that he was able to translate Legendre's Geometry and Trigonometry,' which won warm commendation from such authorities as Professor Leslie and Mr. de Morgan.

What led him to reject the Westminster Confession of Faith does not appear. That he did reject it and the Orthodox Faith, we know only too well. What his precise opinions were on theological and religious questions he has nowhere informed us. It would not be easy for us to express how profound our sorrow is at his rejection of Evangelical Christianity, and we here testify our thankfulness at the intimation of an authority that, in his old age, he returned more and more to the principles of his mother. His own account of this crisis is characteristic: I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's

kirk, and it was needful I should now settle it; and so I entered my chamber and closed the door, and around me came trooping a throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition. Doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing were there, and I wrestled with them in an agony of spirit.' His 'father's kirk' was the Secession Church, one of the most rigid ecclesiastical bodies in Scotland at that time. The result of his mental struggles was that he could not enter the ministry, and therefore was driven to cast about for means of a livelihood. As a temporary step, he became a pedagogue, first at his old school in Annan, then as tutor to the sons of an old Indian General, and finally at the Lang toun' of Kirkcaldy. Here he was associated with his old friend Irving. They were united by bonds of friendship which no difference of opinion nor divergence of pursuit ever ruptured, not even when Carlyle saw his gifted friend pass into regions of intellectual chaos whence he never returned. The chapter on Irving in his posthumous work is one of the most touching things in human friendships as well as in literary history. The four years of pedagogy sufficed to sicken him with it as a profession, and we opine that he was constitutionally ill-fitted to be a schoolmaster. He returned to Edinburgh still in doubt as to what line of life he should pursue. At one time he entertained the proposal to enter the legal profession, but this was hardly more congenial to his nature than teaching. As a relief as well as an acquisition, he mastered German, and so thorough was this mastery that German both complexioned his thinking and gave an obvious cast to his language. His course as a writer of books,' as he afterwards described himself in a petition to the House of Commons, was greatly determined by request from Sir D. Brewster, the editor of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia,' to contribute a series of sixteen articles. This encyclopedia was a massive work of eighteen volumes, and took twenty-one years in the issue. We unearthed it in an old library, and naturally turned to the articles 'contributed by Thomas Carlyle, Esq.' In this honest journey work' we are struck with the range and variety of the subjects, and the extraordinary extent of the reading they display. No German subjects are treated of, showing that he had not then broken that fruitful ground. The writing is smooth and equal, nothing answering to the Carlylese of after years. But he soon fell under the spell of the Germans, and gave the world the first fruits of his German studies in an essay on Faust.' None of these efforts brought him much gain, so that he was ready to accept the offer of tutorship to Charles Butler, which Irving had obtained for him. Young Mr. Butler's gifts were only equalled by his personal goodness, and his

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early death, just as he had won a position in the Government of the country, was the subject of universal regret. The young statesman's views on pauperism, emigration, and other politico-social questions leave little doubt as to the fountain whence he drank in his principles. In 1823 Carlyle became a member of the staff of the London Magazine, in the pages of which periodical first appeared his life of Schiller. No name was given, but it was said by many that the writer was no common man. As we read it now we admire the clearness and strength of the writing, as well as the acuteness and vigour of the critical conceptions. Immediately followed his famous translation of Wilhelm Meister's 'Wanderings.' What Carlyle thought of Goethe's novel our readers may see by turning to his 'Rector's Address,' when seventy years were upon him; for ourselves, we can write no eulogy upon either its construction or moral tone. One thing it did, it brought Goethe's name before the British public. Up to this time he was no prophet out of his own country. Only De Quincey, Coleridge, and a few others knew him. When the translation appeared Lord Jeffrey reviewed it in his own slashing this-will-never-do' style, but towards the end of the article he cools down, and admits that the translator was a person of talents,' and says, further, that every part of the work shows him to be a master of at least one of the languages he deals with. De Quincey also made a severe, not to say, a savage attack upon it. How Carlyle has repaid him the readers of the Reminiscences' will know. The Life of Schiller' was so good that it was translated into German and issued with a laudatory preface by Goethe himself.

In 1827 he published four volumes of German translations of romances, &c. In these and in his early Edinburgh Review articles his style began to assume the marked peculiarity so well known in after times. It came out in the Napier correspondence that Jeffery, as editor of the Edinburgh, had pruned his articles of what he held to be extravagancies, and we know, also, how Carlyle rebelled against these editorial excisions. It is a sad fact that these writings brought him little fame and less money. He was better known in Germany than in England.

Little as he was known and low as his finances were, he at this time, 1827, entered into the marriage bonds with Miss Jane Welsh, only daughter of Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, a lineal descendant of John Knox. His wife was a person of great power of mind, of many accomplishments, of true womanly gentleness, and yet of a caustic wit. Her married life was one of purest happiness. Mr. Froude says:

'Mr. Carlyle had superintended her reading while she was yet a girl, and influenced the aims of her life; and during long years of poverty she brightened the thinker's home with a beautiful and cheerful companionship. Those who knew Mr. Carlyle as a friend will ever think of him as having at his side that noble woman, who had softened the rugged path of life, and lived to share the joys of his faithfully-earned success.' After a short residence in Edinburgh the young couple went to live on a small estate of Mrs. Carlyle's at Craigenputtoch, Dumfriesshire. Craigenputtoch stands on the border land of Galloway and Dumfries, and is a farm of considerable extent; the house is a plain, substantial erection. In a letter to Goethe, who had been inquiring about his residence and welfare, he describes his life in a moorland home: 'It is the loveliest nook in Britain, six miles removed from anyone likely to visit us, yet a stage-coach can take us speedily to Edinburgh; while piled upon the table of my little library is a whole cartload of French, German, American, and English journals.' He was but a day's drive from Ecclefechan, Where both father and mother still live to love me. Above all, this bit of earth is our own.' Emerson, the American, visited him and has given a good description of him; from which we make a brief extract ;

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He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary power of conversation in easy command, clinging to his northern accent with evident relish. When too much praise

of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen; but the pig, by a great stroke of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and disparaged Socrates. He persisted in Mirabeau as a hero; Gibbon he called a splendid bridge from the old world to the new.

At the time of his letter to Goethe he says that the only work he had done at Craigenputtoch was his Essay on Burns. Had he done no more his time would have been far from wasted, for nothing finer and fairer has ever been written upon the poet-peasant of Scotland; indeed, nothing more need be said of him, and in substance nothing more has been said. But this essay was not all, for he wrote, in a manner worthy of himself and of his subjects, upon Johnson, Richter, Heyne, Novalis, Voltaire, and Diderot. In addition to this there was seething in his mind the greatest of all his works, Sartor Resartus, -.e., tailor re-clothed, or re-stitched-and ultimately it took shape upon paper. Some of the chapters of this truly wonderful work reveal the spiritual and intellectual experience amid which the real man,

shaped himself into his settled form; he had earned this sacred power of ascendancy over men by low living and high thinking. From this lonely farmhouse, among the moors and hills of Nithsdale, he enunciated principles and lessons that he had, through hard struggling and self-denial, made his own. It is a great, genuine, earnest book, as full of wisdom as of humour-humour mostly as grim as the aspect of the moors and hills around him; nor can we fail to feel the pathos and power in nearly every page. Through its psychological rhapsodies, confessions, invectives, philosophisings, strokes of grave satire, suggestions of deep problems of life and things, and romantic incidents, the dominion of the author over the reader is never once relaxed. Many are repelled by the uncouthness and ungainliness of the terminology, and we confess that we have no defence to offer in this matter, yet, despite this drawback, it is a book that you read and re-read, and each succeeding reading it gains upon you. We have just opened it at the truly wonderful description of sunset at the North Cape, which we quote—

Silence, as of death; for midnight, even in the Arctic latitudes, has its character; nothing but the granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, the peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar ocean, over which, in the utmost north, the great sun hangs low and lazy, as if he, too, were slumbering. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought of crimson and cloth-of-gold, yet does his light stream over the mirror of waters like a tremulous fire-pillar shooting downwards to the abyss, and hides itself under my feet. In such moments solitude also is invaluable; for who would speak or be looked upon when behind him lies all Europe and Africa fast asleep, except the watchmen, and before him the silent immensities and palace of the Eternal, whereof our sun is but a porch-lamp.

It is humiliating that a book of the highest genius failed to find a publisher; and when it was published in Fraser's Magazine it failed to find appreciative readers. One said that it lacked tact, another that its humour was Teutonic and heavy, another, again, said that much German and genius had made the writer mad. No wonder that this cold treatment disheartened him. I have given up,' he says, the notion of hawking my little manuscript book about any further; for a long time it has lain quiet in the drawer, waiting for a better day.' During its appearance subscribers wrote to Fraser, protesting against that crazy stuff about clothes.' The Americans soon discovered its worth, and he was gladdened with a printed copy and a substantial sum of money from American publishers. The early and general recognition of the value of his writings in America produced a deep impression upon him, as is seen in his will so recently made