Thomas Carlyle, A Biography | Page 9

followed that of Burns, in the
early fame of Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the Quarterly and
_Edinburgh Reviews,_ and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the
University were conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of
ability required from Professors, some of them--conspicuously Brown
(the more original if less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart),
Playfair, and Leslie--rising to a higher rank. But great Educational
Institutions must adapt themselves to the training of average minds by
requirements and restrictions against which genius always rebels.
Biography more than History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle
are, like those of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests
or growls of irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He

was never in any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty--Aeschylus
and Sophocles mainly in translations--and while appreciating Tacitus
disparaged Horace. For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he
never cared, and in his days there was written over the Academic
entrances "No Mysticism." He distinguished himself in Mathematics,
and soon found, by his own vaunt, the Principia of Newton prostrate at
his feet: he was a favourite pupil of Leslie, who escaped the frequent
penalty of befriending him, but he took no prizes: the noise in the class
room hindered his answers, and he said later to Mr. Froude that
thoughts only came to him properly when alone.
[Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had
mastered the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to
God than he had done before."]
The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by
choice and necessity _integer vitae_, he divided his time between the
seclusion of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was
perhaps the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed
his course without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the
same year, accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as
successor to Irving, who had been translated to Haddington. Still in
formal pursuit of the ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its
fences, he went up twice a year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall,
one of which, "on the uses of affliction," was afterwards by himself
condemned as flowery; another was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num
detur religio naturalis." The posthumous publication of some of his
writings, e.g. of the fragment of the novel _Wotton Reinfred_,
reconciles us to the loss of those which have not been recovered.
In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and
corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters,
reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written
in that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style,
"the tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly
commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon;
or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world

more valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it";
or to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns
with impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king."
Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of
aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves
with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere
inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas
Murray he writes:--
Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known
has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and
principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and
noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding
to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary
fame.
That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is
ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of
Leyden :--
Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye, For that was a day When we
stood in our array Like the lion's might at bay.
"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell
consumes almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have
not, then I desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of
_him_," etc. Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays"
illustrates the lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been
previously travestied in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns.
"Many of his opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to
refer all the modifications of national character to the