He became a mathematical teacher, and at one time was a candidate for the Professorship of Astronomy in Glasgow. Traces of these studies appear not only in his figurative allusions, but in an amount of scientific method far beyond what is generally found in writers of high imagination.

In the end of May 1814 he quitted Edinburgh, having gone through the usual curriculum in arts; and, by competitive trial at Dumfries, got the teachership of mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, where, as we have mentioned, he had himself been a scholar. After two years' service in that post, he was, through the recommendation of his Edinburgh professors, offered the teachership of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy, and held that appointment also for about two years. In Kirkcaldy he made the intimate acquaintance of Edward Irving, who, like himself, had been a schoolboy at Annan, and who for some years was master of a "venture school" in Kirkcaldy, known as "The Academy."

The time spent by Carlyle in schoolmastering, and its probable influence on his habits of thought and feeling, have been a little exaggerated. He was barely three-and-twenty when he gave it up. In the end of 1818 he left Kirkcaldy, and went across to Edinburgh, with no definite prospects, but with a vague leaning towards literature. He spent some three years in Edinburgh mainly in what he would call" stony-ground husbandries." His only known literary work during those years was the composition of certain articles for Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopedia." It is probably to this period especially that we must refer the rumours of his unprecedented reading in the University library; he devoured extraordinary numbers of books on history, poetry (in a moderate degree), romance, and general information as to all countries, and all things of popular interest. In 1821 he became tutor to Charles Buller, an appointment that probably relieved him from a good deal of distasteful drudgery.

In 1823 he sent to the 'London Magazine' the first instalment of his 'Life of Schiller.' In 1824 his publications were numerous; he finished his 'Life of Schiller,' and produced a translation of 'Legendre's Geometry,' with an original Essay on Proportion, as well as his first notable work, the translation of 'Wilhelm Meister.' During the next two years he laboured at translations from the German, "honest journey-work, not of his own suggesting or desiring." In 1825 his Schiller appeared in a separate form. 1826 he married Miss Jane Welsh, only daughter of Dr Welsh, a lineal descendant from John Knox, and lived with his wife in Edinburgh till he had completed and published four volumes of translations from German romance. He then (in 1828) retired to the farm of Craigenputtoch, in Dumfriesshire, a small property

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belonging to his wife, situated about a day's journey east of his native Ecclefechan.

When he married he resigned his tutorship, and henceforth devoted his whole time to letters. At Craigenputtoch he lived about six years. His manner of life he described in an oftenquoted letter to Goethe, with whom he had been brought into correspondence by his translation of Wilhelm Meister.' He had retired to his own "bit of earth" to "secure the independence through which he could be enabled to remain true to himself.” "Six miles from any one likely to visit him," "in the loveliest nook of Scotland," he yet kept himself informed of what was passing in the literary world; he had, "piled upon the table of his little library, a whole cartload of French, German, American, and English journals and periodicals." He was "uncertain about his future literary activity."

At Craigenputtoch he wrote for various periodicals-The Edinburgh Review,' The Foreign Quarterly,' Fraser's Magazine'the essays reprinted in the three first volumes of his Miscellanies.' Two of these are estimates of British writers; the Essay on Burns (1828), mentioned in his letter to Goethe as the only thing of importance he had written during his first year at Craigenputtoch; and his Essay on Boswell's Life of Johnson.' The • others are estimates of German and French authors-Richter, Werner, Goethe, Heine, Novalis, Schiller, Voltaire, Diderot. His own line of literary activity being yet undeveloped, he occupied himself in measuring the literary activity of others. But during this period of criticism he had been revolving and finishing an original work in a peculiar vein, the 'Sartor Resartus,' which, after being rejected by several publishers, at length saw the light as a series of articles in Fraser's Magazine,' 1833-34. The singularity and force of the Sartor drew upon the author more attention than he had hitherto received.

In 1834 he removed to the London suburb now associated with his name. The "Seer of Chelsea" is now as familiar a synonym as "the glorious Dreamer of Highgate." His fame was then in a rapid ascendant. The Sartor was much admired in America; it and his fugitive essays were reprinted at Boston in 1836. In 1837 he gave to "a very crowded, yet a select, audience" in London a course of six public lectures on German literature; in 1838 a course of twelve "On the History of Literature, or the Successive Periods of European Culture;" in 1839 a course on "the Revolutions of Modern Europe;" in 1840 a course on "Heroes, HeroWorship, and the Heroic in History."1 These lectures made a sensation in fashionable literary circles; the rugged English, the Scotch accent, the emphatic sing-song cadence, combined with the

1 The last course only has been published.

loftiness and originality of the matter, drew crowds to hear the new prophet. "It was," said Leigh Hunt, "as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by German philosophy and his own intense reflections and experiences."

Meanwhile his master-works began to appear. In 1837 he produced The French Revolution,' the first work that bore his name. In 1838 Sartor Resartus,' "hitherto a mere aggregate of Magazine articles," emerged from its "bibliopolic difficulties," and became a book. The same year witnessed the first edition of his 'Miscellanies. In 1839 he published, under the title of 'Chartism,' his first attack on the corruption of modern society, and the futility of all extant projects of reform. In 1843 he followed up 'Chartism' with Past and Present.' In 1845 he published his 'Cromwell's Letters and Speeches,' which met with a more rapid sale than any of his previous works. In 1850 he returned, in his 'Latter-Day Pamphlets,' to the condition of society, pouring forth unmeasured contempt on "The Nigger Question," "The Present Time," "Model Prisons," "Downing Street," "The New Downing Street," "Stump Orators," ‚""Parliaments," "Hudson's Statue," "Jesuitism." Next year appeared his Biography of John Sterling.' Thereafter he was occupied exclusively with his great historical work, 'The History of Frederick II., commonly called The Great.' The two first volumes were published in 1858, other two in 1862, and in 1865 · the work was completed.

In the session of 1865-66 he was elected Lord Rector by the students of Edinburgh University; and on April 2, 1866, delivered to a crowded and enthusiastic audience his famous Installation Address. He was not suffered long to enjoy the most affecting public manifestations that have ever honoured his name. His wife died before his return to London: in the very hour of his public triumph came the stroke of calamity; and the old man mourned that "the light of his life was quite gone out." Of late years he has published no large work. Now and then he makes his voice heard on questions of passing interest. 1867 he wrote for Macmillan's Magazine' a very gloomy anticipation of the consequences of the Reform Bill, with the suggestive title, "Shooting Niagara, and After?" In 1869 he sent to the newspapers a letter on his favourite "Emigration." His last utterance was in 1870, on the war between France and Germany, rejoicing over the French defeat, and quoting history to show that it had been well deserved.

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In his Rectorial Address at Edinburgh, being then a patriarch of seventy, he addressed a kindly warning to his youthful hearers against the physical dangers of too severe study. His own strong frame and great constitutional robustness were early impaired by

injudicious closeness of application. During the whole of his later. life he suffered from dyspepsia. It says much for the native energy of his system that, in spite of this depressing if not debilitating -disorder, he accomplished such an amount of solid work, retaining his powers to old age, and writing with unabated vigour at the extreme age of seventy. He had sufficient strength of will to sustain what De Quincey always recognised as the best remedy for his "appalling stomachic derangement"—namely, regular habits of active exercise.

We spoke of Macaulay as a man whose intellectual energies were to some extent dissipated upon various fields of exertion. Carlyle's energies have been to a much greater degree concentrated upon his books. For nearly half a century he gave the best part of his working time to literature, pursuing his appointed tasks with the utmost regularity and method. Probably more intellectual force has been spent upon the production of Carlyle's books than upon the productions of any two other writers in general literature.

His powers of memory were not of the same universally and immediately dazzling order as Macaulay's. Every person that met Macaulay went away in astonishment at "the stores which his memory had at instantaneous command." In private society Carlyle impresses his hearers by talk very much resembling the general texture of his writings. The first notice that we have of him is in De Quincey's Autobiographical Sketches,' where "a young man introduced by Irving is said to have delivered a eulogy on Mahomet, and to have had a joke passed upon him by Charles Lamb in consequence. He had not Macaulay's wideranging readiness of recollection, could not quote with the same instantaneous fluency, and could not trust his memory so confidently without a written note. Again-to compare him in this particular with De Quincey-he does not strike us as possessing great multifarious knowledge. He makes comparatively few allusions beyond the circle of subjects that he has specially studied. His scrupulous love of accuracy may have hampered the flowing display of his knowledge; but within the circles of his special studies, his memory is pre-eminently wonderful. To hold in mind the varied materials of his vivid historical pictures was a strain of retentive force immeasurably greater than was ever required of either De Quincey or Macaulay for the production of their works. His memory is singularly catholic as regards the kind of thing remembered; he remembers names, dates, scenical groupings, and the characteristic gestures and expressions of whole societies of men, to all appearance with equal fidelity.

Carlyle is sometimes loosely spoken of as a great "thinker," but his power does not lie in the regions of the dry understanding, in

analysis, argument, or practical judgment. In his youth he was distinguished as a mathematician; but when he turned to the study of men, he took fire: on anything connected with man, he felt too profoundly to reason well. His whole nature rose in rebellion against cold-blooded analysis and matter-of-fact argument. In his works he is never tired of sneering at "Philosophism," the "Dismal Science" of Political Economy, "Attorney Logic," and suchlike. He had a natural antipathy to such ways of approaching men and the affairs of men. He was naturally incapable of De Quincey's pursuit of character or meaning into minute shades, and of Macaulay's elaborate refutations by copious instance and analogy. Take, for example, his Hero-worship. Instead of analysing, as De Quincey might have done, the elements of greatness in his heroes, or of producing, as Macaulay might have done, argumentative arrays of actual undeniable achievements as the proof of their title to admiration, he exercises his ingenuity in representing their greatness under endless varieties of striking images; the hero is "a flowing lightfountain of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;""at all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him;" "a messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us."

Though deficient as an analyst and as a debater, he shows in other forms abundance of the elementary intellectual force principally concerned in analysis and debate. Had his feelings been less dominant, he might have developed into a profound professor of what he calls the Dismal Science, and might even, with unprecedented persuasive skill, have converted the world to the practice of Malthusianism. But feeling and natural impulses chained his great intellect to their service; and instead of scientific analysis and solid argument, the result is a splendour and originality of imagery and dramatic grouping that entitle him to rank with Shakspeare, or with whoever may be placed next to our received ideal of the incomparable.

men.

A man of feeling and impulse, his feelings and impulses were very different from what we find in natures constitutionally fitted for enjoyment, in the born lovers of existence, his own "eupeptic In his works we encounter something very different from Macaulay's uniform glow of buoyant hopefulness, hearty belief in human progress, and confident plausible judgment of men and events. We find gloomy views of man and his destiny, a stern gospel of work, judgments passed in strong defiance of conventional standards, and towering egotism under the mask of humour. In another aspect he strikes us as offering a considerable contrast to De Quincey. The Opium-Eater, though not by any means a eupeptic man, was an avowed Eudæmonist, "hated an inhuman moralist like unboiled opium," and was a lover of repose and of