Victorian Worthies | Page 7

to the stern discipline of the home, he passed, happily on
the whole, through his childhood and soon outstripped his comrades in
the village school. His success there led to his going in his tenth year to
the grammar school at Annan; and before he reached his fourteenth

year he trudged off on foot to Edinburgh to begin his studies at the
university.
Instead of young men caught up by express trains and deposited, by the
aid of cabmen and porters, in a few hours in the sheltered courts of
Oxford and Cambridge, we must imagine a party of boys, of fourteen
or fifteen years old, trudging on foot twenty miles a day for five days
across bleak country, sleeping at rough inns, and on their arrival
searching for an attic in some bleak tenement in a noisy street. Here
they were to live almost entirely on the baskets of home produce sent
through the carriers at intervals by their thrifty parents. It was and is a
Spartan discipline, and it turns out men who have shown their grit and
independence in all lands where the British flag is flown.
The earliest successes which Carlyle won, both at Annan and at
Edinburgh, were in mathematics. His classical studies received little
help from his professors, and his literary gifts were developed mostly
by his own reading, and stimulated from time to time by talks with
fellow students. Perhaps it was for his ultimate good that he was not
brought under influences which might have guided him into more
methodical courses and tamed his rugged originality. The universities
cannot often be proved to have fostered kindly their poets and original
men of letters; at least we may say that Edinburgh was a more kindly
Alma Mater to Carlyle than Oxford and Cambridge proved to Shelley
and Byron. His native genius, and the qualities which he inherited from
his parents, were not starved in alien soil, but put out vigorous growth.
From such letters to his friends as have survived, we can see what a
power Carlyle had already developed of forcibly expressing his ideas
and establishing an influence over others.
He left the university at the age of nineteen, and the next twelve years
of his life were of a most unsettled character. He made nearly as many
false starts in life as Goldsmith or Coleridge, though he redeemed them
nobly by his persistence in after years. In 1814 his family still regarded
the ministry as his vocation, and Carlyle was himself quite undecided
about it. To promote this idea the profession of schoolmaster was taken
up for the time. He continued in it for more than six years, first at

Annan and then at Kirkcaldy; but he was soon finding it uncongenial
and rebelling against it. A few years later he tried reading law with no
greater contentment; and in order to support himself he was reduced to
teaching private pupils. The chief friend of this period was Edward
Irving, the gifted preacher who afterwards, in London, came to tragic
shipwreck. He was a native of Annan, five years older than Carlyle, and
he had spent some time in preaching and preparing for the ministry. He
was one of the few people who profoundly influenced Carlyle's life. At
Kirkcaldy he was his constant companion, shared his tastes, lent him
books, and kindled his powers of insight and judgement in many a
country walk. Carlyle has left us records of this time in his
Reminiscences, how he read the twelve volumes of Irving's Gibbon in
twelve days, how he tramped through the Trossachs on foot, how in
summer twilights he paced the long stretches of sand at Irving's side.
It was Irving who in 1822 commended him to the Buller family, with
whom he continued as tutor for two years. Charles Buller, the eldest
son, was a boy of rare gifts and promise, worthy of such a teacher; and
but for his untimely death in 1848 he might have won a foremost place
in politics. The family proved valuable friends to Carlyle in after-life,
besides enabling him at this time to live in comfort, with leisure for his
own studies and some spare money to help his family. But for this aid,
his brother Alexander would have fared ill with the farming, and John
could never have afforded the training for the medical profession.
Again, it was Irving who first took him to Haddington in 1821 and
introduced him to Jane Baillie Welsh, his future wife. Irving's sincerity
and sympathy, his earnest enthusiasm joined with the power of genuine
laughter (always to Carlyle a mark of a true rich nature), made him
through all these years a thoroughly congenial companion. He really
understood Carlyle as few outside his family did, and he never grew