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 convinces, 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

haste to Mainhill to a consultation, and the result was a letter which shows the touching affection with which the Carlyles clung to one another.

J. A. Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle.`

Mainhill, February 1820.

I have just arrived from Annan, and we are all so uneasy on your account that at the request of my father in particular, and of all the rest, I am determined to write to call on you for a speedy answer. Your father and mother, and all of us, are extremely anxious that you should come home directly if possible, if you think you can come without danger. And we trust that, notwithstanding the bitterness of last summer, you will still find it emphatically a home. My mother bids me call upon you to do so by every tie of affection, and by all that is sacred. She esteems seeing you again and administering comfort to you as her highest felicity. Your father, also, is extremely anxious to see you again at home. The room is much more comfortable than it was last season. The roads are re

paired, and all things more convenient; and we all trust that you will yet recover, after you shall have inhaled your native breezes and escaped once more from the unwholesome city of Edinburgh, and its selfish and unfeeling inhabitants. In the name of all, then, I call upon you not to neglect or refuse our earnest wishes; to come home and experience the comforts of parental and brotherly affection, which, though rude and without polish, is yet sincere and honest.

The father adds a postscript:

My dear Tom, I have been very uneasy about you ever since we received your moving letter, and I thought to have written to you myself this day and told you all my thoughts about your health, which is the foundation and copestone of all our earthly comfort. But, being particularly engaged this day, I caused John to write. Come home as soon as possible, and for ever oblige,

Dear sir, your loving father,

JAMES CARLYLE.

The fright had been unnecessary. Dyspepsia, while it tortures body and mind, does little serious injury. The attack had passed off. A letter from Carlyle was already on the way, in which the illness was scarcely noticed; it contained little but directions for his brothers' studies, and an offer of ten pounds out of his scantily filled purse to assist Sandy' on the farm. With his family it was impossible for him to talk freely, and through this gloomy time he had but one friend, though he was of priceless value. To Irving he had written out his discontent. He was now disgusted with law, and meant to abandon it. Irving, pressed as he was with work, could always afford Carlyle the best of his time and judgment.

Edward Irving to Thomas Carlyle.

Glasgow, March 14, 1820.

Since I received your last epistle, which reminded me of some of those gloomy scenes of nature I have often had the greatest pleasure in contemplating, I have, been wrought almost to death, having had three sermons to write, and one of them a charity sermon; but I shall make many sacrifices before I shall resign the entertainment and benefit I derive from our correspondence.

Your mind is of too penetrating a cast to rest satisfied with the frail disguise which the happiness of ordinary life has thrown on to hide its nakedness, and I do never augur that your nature is to be satisfied with its sympathies. Indeed, I am convinced that were you translated into the most elegant and informed circle of this city, you would find it please only by its novelty, and perhaps refresh by its variety; but you would be constrained to seek the solid employment and the lasting gratification of your mind elsewhere. The truth is, life is a thing formed. for the average of men, and it is only in those parts of our nature which are of average possession that it can gratify. The higher parts of our nature find their entertainment in sympathising with the highest efforts of our species, which are, and will continue, confined to the closet of the sage, and can never find their station in the drawing-rooms of the talking world. Indeed, I will go higher and say that the highest parts of our nature can never have their proper food till they turn to contemplate the excellencies of our Creator, and not only to contemplate but to imitate them. Therefore it is, my dear Carlyle, that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which they receive them, and the ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of it, but of your feelings and affections, which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of mind.

There is just another panacea for your griefs (which are not imaginary, but for which I see a real ground in the too penetrating and, at times perhaps, too severe turn of your mind); but though I judge it better and more worthy than reserve, it is perhaps more difficult of practice. I mean the habit of using our superiority for the information and improvement of others. This I reckon both the most dignified and the most kindly course that one can take, founded upon the great principles of human improvement, and founded upon what I am wont, or at least would wish, to make my pattern, the example of the Saviour of men, who endured, in His errand of salvation, the contradiction of men. But I confess, on the other hand, one meets with so few that are apt disciples, or willing to allow superiority, that will be constantly fighting with you upon the threshold, that it is very heartless, and forces one to reserve. And besides, one is so apt to fancy a superiority where there is none, that it is likely to produce overmuch self-complacency. But I see I am beginning to prose, and therefore shall change the subject-with only one remark, that your tone of mind reminds me more than anything of my own when under the sense of great religious imperfection, and anxiously pursuing after higher Christian attainments.

I have read your letter again, and, at the risk of further prosing, I shall have another hit at its contents. You talk of renouncing the law, and you speak mysteriously of hope springing up from another quarter. I pray that it may soon be turned into enjoyment. But I would not have you renounce the law unless you coolly think that this new view contains those fields of happiness, from the want of which the prospect of law has become so dreary. Law has within it scope ample enough for any mind. The reformation which it needs, and which with so much humour and feeling you describe,' is the very evidence of what I say. Did Adam Smith find the commercial system less encumbered? (I know he did not find it more); and see what order the mind of

• I.e. the talk to which you usually treat your friends.