Smail has now vanished from his side; and we hear chiefly of James Johnstone, afterwards schoolmaster of Haddington, the Robert Mitchell already mentioned as one of his fellow-students in the Moral Philosophy class, a Thomas Mitchell, afterwards one of the classical masters in the Edinburgh Academy, and the Thomas Murray already mentioned as having been with him in the 2d Greek class. To these has to be added, on the faith of certain extant letters, a certain clever and whimsical fellow-student of the name of Hill, who used to delight in signing himself “Peter Pindar.” In the circle of these, and of others whose names are forgotten, young Carlyle, at the time of his leaving college, was already an object of admiration and respect passing all that is ordinary in such cases of juvenile _camaraderie_. Intellectually and morally, he had impressed them as absolutely _unique_ among them all,—such a combination of strength of character, rugged independence of manner, prudence, great literary powers, high aspirations and ambition, habitual despondency, and a variety of other humours, ranging from the ferociously sarcastic to the wildly tender, that it was impossible to set limits to what he was likely to become in the world. The proofs are extant in documents of a date only a few months in advance of our present point. On the 1st of January 1814, the above-mentioned Hill, who seems to have been the freest and most jocose in his style of address to Carlyle, and had nicknamed him “The Dean” or “The Doctor,” by some implied comparison with Dean Swift, wrote to him as follows.—“You mention some two or three disappointments you have met with lately. For shame, sir, to be so peevish and splenetic! Your disappointments are trifles light as air when compared with the vexations and disappointments _I_ have experienced.” Again, in a letter dated the 9th of May in the same year, he begins:—“Dear Doctor, I received yours last night; and a scurrilous, blackguardly, flattering, vexing, pernickety, humorous, witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer it piecemeal, as a certain Honourable House does a speech from its sovereign, by echoing back each syllable? No; this won’t do. Oh! how I envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an off-hand way, ever varying the scene with wit and mirth, while honest Peter must hold on in one numskull track to all eternity, pursuing the even tenor of his way, so that one of Peter’s letters is as good as a thousand.”[11] More significant and serious is the following from one of the preserved letters to Carlyle by his friend Thomas Murray, the date “July 27,” and presumably of the year 1814:—“I have had the pleasure of receiving, my dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly letter, a letter remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of expression, and an affectionate pathos, which indicate a peculiar turn of mind, make sincerity doubly striking, and wit doubly poignant. You flatter me with