Carlyle was thinking as much as his mother of religion, but the form in which his thoughts were running was not hers. He was painfully seeing that all things were not wholly as he had been taught to think of them; the doubts which had stopped his divinity career were blackening into thunder-clouds; and all his reflections were coloured by dyspepsia. I was entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles,' he says, 'solitary, eating my own heart, fast losing my health too, a prey to nameless struggles and miseries, which have yet a kind of horror in them to my thoughts, three weeks without any kind of sleep from impossibility to be free of noise.' In fact he was entering on what he called 'the three most miserable years of my life.' He would have been saved from much could he have resolutely thrown himself into his intended profession; but he hated it, as just then, perhaps, he would have hated anything.

I had thought (he writes in a note somewhere) of attempting to become an advocate. It seemed glorious to me for its independency, and I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as wages for all that bogpool of disgust. Hume's lectures once done with, I flung the thing away for ever.

Men who are out of humour with themselves see their condition reflected in the world outside them, and everything seems amiss because it is not well with themselves. But the state of Scotland and England also was fitted to feed his discontent. The great war had been followed by a collapse. Wages were low, food at famine prices. Tens of thousands of artisans were out of work, their families were starving, and they themselves were growing mutinous. Even at home from his own sternly patient father, who never meddled with politics, he heard things not calculated to reconcile him to existing arrangements.

I have heard my father say (he mentions), with an impressiveness which all his perceptions carried with them, that the lot of a poor man was growing worse, that the world would not, and could not, last as it was, but mighty changes, of which none saw the end, were on the way. In the dear years when the oatmeal was as high as ten shillings a stone, he had noticed the labourers, I have heard him tell, retire each separately to a brook and there drink instead of dining, anxious only to hide it.

These early impressions can be traced through the whole of Carlyle's writings, the conviction being forced upon him that there was something vicious to the bottom in English and Scotch society, and that revolution in some form or other lay visibly ahead. So long as Irving remained in Edinburgh the condition of the people' question was the constant subject of talk between him and Carlyle. They were both of them ardent, radical, indignant at the injustice which they witnessed, and as yet unconscious of the difficulty of mending

it. Irving, however, Carlyle had seen little of since they had moved to Edinburgh, and he was left, for the most part, alone with his own thoughts. There had come upon him the trial which in these days awaits every man of high intellectual gifts and noble nature on his first actual acquaintance with human things-the question, far deeper than any mere political one, What is this world then, what is this human life, over which a just God is said to preside, but of whose presence or whose providence so few signs are visible? In happier ages religion silences scepticism if it cannot reply to its difficulties, and postpones the solution of the mystery to another stage of existence. Brought up in a pious family where religion was not talked about or emotionalised, but was accepted as the rule of thought and conduct, himself too instinctively upright, pure of heart, and reverent, Carlyle, like his parents, had accepted the Bible as a direct communication from Heaven. It made known the will of God, and the relations in which man stood to his Maker, as a present fact, the truth of it, like the truth of gravitation, which man must act upon or immediately suffer the consequences. But religion, as revealed in the Bible, passes beyond present conduct, penetrates all forms of thought, and takes possession wherever it goes. It claims to control the intellect, to explain the past and foretell the future. It has entered into poetry and art, and has been the interpreter of history. And thus there had grown round it a body of opinion on all varieties of subjects assumed to be authoritative; dogmas which science was contradicting; a history of events which it called infallible, yet which the canons of evidence, by which other histories are tried and tested successfully, declared not to be infallible at all. In the Mainhill household the Westminster Confession was a full and complete account of the position of mankind and of the Being to whom they owed their existence. For Carlyle's father and mother this Old and New Testament not only contained all spiritual truth necessary for guidance in word and deed, but every fact related in them was literally true. To doubt was not to mistake, but was to commit a sin of the deepest dye, and was a sure sign of a corrupted heart. His own wide study of modern literature had shown him that much of this had appeared to many of the strongest minds in Europe to be doubtful or even plainly incredible. Young men of genius are the first to feel the growing influences of their time, and on Carlyle they fell in their most painful form. With his pride, he was most modest and self-distrustful. He had been taught that want of faith was sin, yet, like a true Scot, he knew that he would peril his soul if he pretended to believe what his intellect told him was false. If any part of what was called Revelation was mistaken, how could he be assured of the rest? How could he tell that the moral part of it, to which the phenomena which he saw round him were in plain contradiction, was more than a 'devout imagination'? Thus in the

midst of his poverty and dyspepsia there had come upon him the struggle which is always hardest in the noblest minds, which Job had known, and David, and Solomon, and Eschylus, and Shakespeare, and Goethe. Where are the tokens of His presence? where are the signs of coming? Is there, in this universe of things, any moral Providence at all? or is it the product of some force of the nature of which we can know nothing, save only that 'one event comes alike to all, to the good and to the evil, and that there is no difference'?

Commonplace persons, if assailed by such misgivings, thrust them aside, throw themselves into outward work, and leave doubt to settle itself. Carlyle could not. The importunacy of the overwhelming problem forbade him to settle himself either to law or any other business till he had wrestled down the misgivings which had grappled with him. The greatest of us have our weaknesses, and the Margaret Gordon business perhaps intertwined itself with the spiritual torment. The result of it was that Carlyle was extremely miserable, tortured,' as he says, 'by the freaks of an imagination of extraordinary and wild activity.'

He went home, as he had proposed, after the session, but Mainhill was never a less happy place of retreat to him than it proved this summer. He could not conceal, perhaps he did not try to conceal, the condition of his mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have seemed as if 'possessed.' He could not read; he wandered about the moors like a restless spirit. His mother was in agony about him. He was her darling, her pride, the apple of her eye, and she could not restrain her lamentations and remonstrances. His father, with supreme good judgment, left him to himself.

His tolerance for me, his trust in me (Carlyle says), was great. When I declined going forward into the Church, though his heart was set upon it, he respected my scruples, and patiently let me have my way. When I had peremptorily ceased from being a schoolmaster, though he inwardly disapproved of the step as imprudent and saw me in successive summers lingering beside him in sickliness of body and mind, without outlook towards any good, he had the forbearance to say at worst nothing, never once to whisper discontent with me.

In November he was back at Edinburgh again, with his pupils and his law lectures, which he had not yet deserted, and still persuaded himself that he would persevere with. He did not find his friend. Irving had gone to Glasgow to be assistant to Dr. Chal

mers.

The law lectures went on, and Carlyle wrote to his mother about his progress with them. The law,' he said, 'I find to be a most complicated subject, yet I like it pretty well, and feel that I shall like it better as I proceed. Its great charm in my eyes is that no

mean compliances are requisite for prospering in it.' To Irving he had written a fuller, not yet completely full, account of himself, complaining perhaps of his obstructions and difficulties. Irving's advice is not what would have been given by a cautious attorney. He admired his friend, and only wished his great capabilities to be known as soon as possible.

Edward Irving to Thomas Carlyle.

34, Kent Street, Glasgow: December 28, 1819. Dear Carlyle,-I pray that you may prosper in your legal studies, provided only you will give your mind to take in all the elements which enter into the question of the obstacles. But remember, it is not want of knowledge alone that impedes, but want of instruments for making that knowledge available. This you know better than I. Now my view of the matter is that your knowledge, likely very soon to surpass in extent and accuracy that of most of your compeers, is to be made saleable, not by the usual way of adding friend to friend, which neither you nor I are enough patient of, but by a way of your own. Known you must be before you can be employed. Known you will not be for a winning, attaching, accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather self-willed man. Now establish this last character, and you take a far higher grade than any other. How are you to establish it? Just by bringing yourself before the public as you are. First find vent for your notions. Get them tongue; upon every subject get them tongue, not upon law alone. You cannot at present get them either utterance or audience by ordinary converse. Your utterance is not the most favourable. It conviuces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse. They are generally (I exclude myself) unphilosophical, unthinking drivellers who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the rencounter. Therefore, my dear friend, some other way is to be sought for. Now pause, if you be not convinced of this conclusion. If you be, we shall proceed. If you be not, read again, and you will see it just, and as such admit it. Now what way is to be sought for? I know no other than the press. You have not the pulpit as I have, and where perhaps I have the advantage. You have not good and influential society. I know nothing but the press for your purpose. None are so good as these two, the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine. Do not start away and say, The one I am not fit for, the other I am not willing for. Both pleas I refuse. The Edinburgh Review you are perfectly fit for; not yet upon law, but upon any work of mathematics, physics, general literature, history, and politics, you are as ripe as the average of their writers. Blackwood's Magazine presents bad company, I confess; but it also furnishes a good field for fugitive writing, and good introductions to society on one side of the question. This last advice, I confess, is against my conscience, and I am inclined to blot it out; for did I not rest satisfied that you were to use your pen for your conscience I would never ask you to use it for your living. Writers in the encyclopædias, except of leading articles, do not get out from the crowd; but writers in the Review come out at once, and obtain the very opinion you want, opinion among the intelligent and active men in every rank, not among the sluggish savants alone.

It is easy for me to advise what many perhaps are as ready to advise. But I know I have influence, and I am willing to use it. Therefore, again let me entreat you to begin a new year by an effort continuous, not for getting knowledge, but for communicating it, that you may gain favour, and money, and opinion.

Do not disembark all your capital of thought, and time, and exertion into this concern, but disembark a portion equal to its urgency, and make the experiment upon a proper scale. If it succeed, the spirit of adventure will follow, and you will be ready to embark more; if it fail, no great venture was made; no great venture is lost; the time is not yet come. But you will have got a more precise view by the failure, of the obstacles to be surmounted, and time and energy will give you what you lacked. Therefore I advise you as a very sincere friend that forthwith you choose a topic, not that you are best informed on, but that you are most likely to find admittance for, and set apart some portion of each day or week to this object and this alone, leaving the rest free for objects professional and pleasant. This is nothing more than what I urged at our last meeting, but I have nothing to write I reckon so important. Therefore do take it to thought. Depend upon it, you will be delivered by such present adventure from those harpies of your peace you are too much tormented with. You will get a class with whom society will be as pleasant as we have found it together, and you will open up ultimate prospects which I trust no man shall be able to close.

I think our town is safe for every leal-hearted man to his Maker and to his fellow-men to traverse without fear of scaith. Such traversing is the wine and milk of my present existence. I do not warrant against a Radical rising, though I think it vastly improbable. But continue these times a year or two, and unless you unmake our present generation, and unman them of human feeling and of Scottish intelligence, you will have commotion. It is impossible for them to die of starvation, and they are making no provision to have them relieved. And what on earth is for them? God and my Saviour enable me to lift their hearts above a world that has deserted them, though they live in its plenty and labour in its toiling service, and fix them upon a world which, my dear Carlyle, I wish you and I had the inheritance in; which we may have if we will. But I am not going to preach, else I would plunge into another subject which I rate above all subjects. Yet this should not be excluded from our communion either.

I am getting on quietly enough, and, if I be defended from the errors of my heart, may do pretty well. The Doctor (Chalmers) is full of acknowledgments, and I ought to be full-to a higher source.

Yours affectionately,

EDWARD IRVING.

Carlyle was less eager to give his thoughts tongue' than Irving supposed. He had not yet, as he expressed it, 'taken the Devil by the horns.' He did not mean to trouble the world with his doubts, and as yet he had not much else to trouble it with. But he was more and more restless. Reticence about his personal sufferings was at no time one of his virtues. Dyspepsia had him by the throat. Even the minor ailments to which our flesh is heir, and which most of us bear in silence, the eloquence of his imagination flung into forms like the temptations of a saint. His mother had early described him as 'gay ill to live wi',' and while in great things he was the most considerate and generous of men, in trifles he was intolerably irritable. Dyspepsia accounts for most of it. He did not know what was the matter with him, and when the fit was severe he drew pictures of his condition which frightened every one belonging to him. He had sent his family in the middle of the winter a report of himself which made them think that he was seriously ill. His brother John, who had now succeeded him as a teacher in Annan School, was sent for in