Content with the description of that first stroll, he leaves us to imagine how, in the first days and weeks of his residence in the city, he gradually extended his acquaintance with it by further rambles, and by inspection of this and that interesting to a young stranger. The task is not difficult. The lodging which Smail and he had taken between them was, he says, “a clean-looking, most cheap lodging,” in the “poor locality” called Simon Square. The locality still survives under that name, though hardly as a square any longer, but only a poor street, at the back of Nicolson Street, on the left hand as one goes southwards from the University, and accessible most directly by an arched passage called Gibb’s Entry. From that obscure centre, by walks from it in the mornings, and returns to it during the day and in the evenings, we can see the little Dumfriesshire fellow gradually conquering for himself some notion of the whole of that Edinburgh into which he had come. It was the old Edinburgh, of less than 100,000 inhabitants, which we think of so fondly now as the Edinburgh of Scott before his novels had been heard of and when his fame depended chiefly on his poems, of Jeffrey in the early heyday of his lawyership and editorship of the _Edinburgh Review_, and of the other local celebrities, Whig and Tory, immortalised in tradition and in Cockburn’s _Memorials_. It was chiefly of the externals of the city that the boy was making his notes; for the living celebrities, as he tells us, were hardly even names to him then. Scott and Jeffrey, he says, may have been in the peripatetic crowd of wigged and gowned lawyers he had seen in the hall of the Parliament House on the day of his arrival; but the only physiognomy he had marked there so as to know it again was that of John Clerk of Eldin. A reminiscence which I have heard from his own lips enables me, however, to connect his first days in Edinburgh with the memory of at least one Edinburgh worthy of a still elder generation. It was on the 18th of December 1809, or just six weeks after Carlyle’s arrival in Edinburgh, that the well-known Dr. Adam, Rector of the High School, died; and I have heard Carlyle tell how the event impressed him, and how he went to see the funeral procession of the old scholar start from the High School yard at the foot of Infirmary Street. With a number of other boys, he said, he hung on by the railings outside, looking in upon the gathered assemblage of mourners. He seemed to remember the scene with peculiar vividness; for, after picturing himself as a boy hanging on by the High School railings, and watching the incidents within, he added, “Ay me! that moment then, and this now, and nothing but the rushing of Time’s wings between!”[10] He had a liking to the last for old Dr. Adam. I have heard him say that any Scotsman who was at a loss on the subject of _shall_ and _will_ would find the whole doctrine in a nutshell in two or three lucid sentences of Dr. Adam’s