reasoning energy was locked up organically, let us say, in his marvellous imagination. And so, remembering all that Scott has left us,—those imperishable tales and romances which no subsequent successes in the British literature of fiction have superseded, and by the glamour of which his own little land of brown heath and shaggy wood, formerly of small account in the world, has become a dream and fascination for all the leisurely of all the nations,—need we cease, after all, from thinking of him in juxtaposition, due interval allowed, with England’s greatest man, the whole world’s greatest man, of the literary order, or abandon the habit of speaking of Sir Walter Scott as our Scottish Shakespeare? CARLYLE’S EDINBURGH LIFE[9] PART I.—1809–1818 Early in November 1809 two boys walked together from Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh, to attend the classes in the University there. The distance, as the crow flies, is about sixty miles; and the boys took three days to it. The elder, who had been at College in the previous session, and therefore acted as the guide, generally stalked on a few paces ahead, whistling an Irish tune to himself. The younger, who was not quite fourteen years of age, and had never been out of Dumfriesshire before, followed rather wearily, irritated by the eternal Irish tune in front of him, but mainly given up to his own “bits of reflections in the silence of the moors and hills.” The elder of the two boys was a Thomas Smail, afterwards of some note as a Burgher minister in Galloway; the younger was Thomas Carlyle. Of the arrival of the two boys in Edinburgh on the 9th of November 1809, after their third day’s walk of twenty miles, and of Carlyle’s first stroll, that afternoon, under Smail’s convoy, through some of the main streets, to see the sights, one may read in his own _Reminiscences_. What he remembered best of that first stroll was the look of the Old High Street, with St. Giles’s Kirk on one side and the old Luckenbooths running up the middle in its broadest part, but chiefly the amazing spectacle to which he was introduced when Smail pushed open a door behind St. Giles’s Kirk, and he found himself in the outer house of the Court of Session, amid the buzz of the lawyers and others walking up and down, with the red-robed judges hearing cases in their little throned enclosures.