ters, 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