Brave words these from the moody lad we saw, not five years ago, plodding up to Edinburgh from Ecclefechan, hardly fourteen years of age, with Tom Smail for pilot. From these words, and from the letters from Hill and Murray with which they connect themselves, we learn two things which I think we should have hardly known otherwise. One is the fact of Carlyle’s decisive passion for literature at this early period of his life, and of his reputation then among his intimates for great powers and acquirements of the purely literary kind. My own fancy, confirmed by one particular talk I had with him during a walk along the Thames Embankment and in the Temple Gardens, had rather been that the passion for literature came latish in his case, and that his original bent had been wholly the mathematical. He certainly did tell me that he had not cared much for poetry, or thought much about matters verbal, till the enthusiasm of an older companion, who used to recite Campbell’s lyrics and dwell with ecstasy on their beauties, came as a revelation to him and set him on fire with a similar passion. My mistake must have been in post-dating the reminiscence. He must have referred, I now see, not to so late a period as that of his college life in Edinburgh, but to the previous days of his mere boyhood in Ecclefechan and at Annan school. Indeed, we have already seen, in the list of his readings from the college library in his first two sessions, that he must have brought with him to the University some strongly formed literary tastes and likings of Ecclefechan and Annan origin. Connecting this piece of evidence with that of the just-quoted letters of himself and his friends in 1814, we are entitled, I think, now to assume the literary stratum to have been the deeper and more primitive in Carlyle’s constitution, and the mathematical vein to have been a superposition upon that. At all events, it is clear that in 1814, when he had concluded his Arts course in the University, it was for his literary powers that he was the wonder of his little circle, and it was on those powers that he set most store himself. For the letters reveal to us yet a second contradiction of what we might have supposed otherwise. No man was ever more contemptuous of fame, and especially of literary fame, than Carlyle was in conversation in his later life. The very phrase “desire for fame,” or any synonym for it, if used in his presence as the name of a worthy motive to exertion of any kind, would have provoked his most scathing scorn. He had no patience for “that last infirmity of noble mind,” and would have regarded even such a designation for the feeling as much too honourable. Yet, as we have seen, he had not escaped the malady himself. Call the ambition after fame by the homeliest name of sarcasm you please,—call it the measles of budding genius,—and the fact, on the evidence of Carlyle’s own confession, is that the attack in his case had been even