which he actually took out from the University library in the first two winter-sessions of his course; and, though the series is very interesting, with some signs even of oddity, it contains hardly a book that the librarians would have had any difficulty in “fishing up.” I regret that, from the destruction or at least the disappearance of the library registers for a considerable lapse of years immediately after Carlyle’s second session, I am unable to exhibit his readings in his third and fourth sessions. The list for those two sessions, when he was passing from his sixteenth year to his eighteenth, and had been bitten by mathematics and physical science, would doubtless have been even more interesting, and probably more extensive and various, than that for the two sessions preceding. That he did continue to be a very diligent reader from the College library I positively know. He used to draw a ludicrous picture of the library accommodations of those days, when the books were in one of the surviving old buildings on one side of the present quadrangle. As I understood him, the students came at definite hours, and ranged themselves in _queue_ in some passage, or at some entry, waiting for the opening of the door, and perhaps battering at it when the sub-librarian inside was dilatory. He was a sulky gentleman, of Celtic blood and stout build, who regarded the readers as his natural enemies; and, when he did open the door, he generally presented himself in _rear_ to the impatient crowd, taking care to bend his body at the final moment so as to administer one last impediment of contempt for the entrants and send some of them sprawling. That was the kind of encouragement to reading, by Carlyle’s account, that he and other University students had in those days. To the end of his life he was all but savage in his resentment of difficulties thrown in the way of access to books by those who had charge of them; and the great Panizzi of the British Museum came in for a good deal of his wrath in private on this account.