“Entertaining an angel unawares” is the phrase I have used to indicate the relations of Carlyle’s teachers in the University to the then unknown young man that sat in their class-rooms. In fact, Carlyle, when he left the University in 1813, a virtual M.A., aged seventeen years and four months, was already potentially the very Carlyle we now revere, in consequence of his subsequent life, as one of the greatest and noblest spirits of his generation. Not yet at his full stature (which, when I knew him first in his yet unbent manhood, was over five feet eleven inches), and of thin, lean, rather gaunt frame (he told me himself he had never weighed more than about ten stone), he was a youth of as great faculty, as noble promise, as Scotland had produced since her Burns, born in 1759, and her Scott, born in 1771. This, or something very little short of this, seems to have been already recognised by those who knew him intimately. They were not many; for he was of peculiarly proud, shy, and reserved ways, if not even morose and unsocial. Poverty also kept him back. It was not for an Ecclefechan lad, chumming with one or two others in like circumstances in a poor lodging in Simon Square, or some other Old Town locality, and receiving his meagre supplies from home, to mix much with general Edinburgh society. The celebrities of that society, indeed, were no longer strangers to him by name or sight, as they had been on his first Edinburgh walk with Smail in 1809. He mentions particularly that Jeffrey’s face and figure had been quite familiar to him since 1811 by visits to the Parliament House; and the same visits, or walks in Princes Street, must have made him familiar with the face and figure of Scott, and the faces and figures of not a few others that were among the civic somebodies of their time. But it was by sight only, and by no more introduction than he had to Arthur Seat or Holyrood House, that he knew those important personages; and into the circles in which they moved he had never entered. Even the Professors of the University, if we except Leslie, seem to have been known to him only by their aspects in college or the vicinity. Further, his acquaintanceships among his fellow-students do not appear to have been numerous. He is not known to have been a member of any of the literary and debating societies which in those days, as in these, were so important an appendage to the apparatus of lectures, class-rooms, and library, and which draw young men together so congenially for the exchange of ideas, the exercise of oratory, and the formation of lasting friendships between kindred souls. His habits were those of solitary reading and musing, with intercourse only with a few companions, clannishly selected for the most part from among the Dumfriesshire or Galloway lads who could claim him as their district-compatriot, whose families he knew, and with one or other of whom he had made his pedestrian journeys homewards at the ends of the sessions.