more severe than it had been in the case of Burns, much more severe than we know it to have been in the case of Scott, and quite as severe as the records show it to have been in the case of young Chalmers. The condition of his mind, in his nineteenth year, with all his moodiness, all his self-despondency, was that of settled literary ambition, an appetency after literary distinction all but enormous. That this rested on honest consciousness of his own extraordinary powers, and was accompanied by a resolve, as deep as was ever in any young man’s heart, that the fame for which he craved should be won, if won at all, only by noble and manly methods, there is no room for doubt. There we see him standing, an unknown youth, teeth clenched and face determined, fronting the world, and anticipating his own future in it, with something of that feeling which, call it what we may, and smile at it as any one may in the retrospect, has probably, by God’s own ordinance, filled every great and honest heart at the outset of a great career:— Lay the vain impostors low! Blockheads fall in every foe; Splendour comes with every blow; Let me do or die. Meanwhile the near future was not very inspiring. Hardly by any wish of his own, but in deference to the fond hopes of his father and mother, and to those social necessities which made the clerical career the only natural and possible one in those days for an educated Scottish youth from the humbler ranks, Carlyle had proceeded to qualify himself for the ministry. Not, however, for the ministry in that Nonconforming communion, called “the Burgher Seceders,” to which his parents belonged, but, apparently with no objection on their part, in the Established or National Scottish Church.[14] Now, the regular qualification for the ministry of the Scottish Church in those days, after a student had passed his Arts course in the University, consisted in further attendance for four winter-sessions in the Divinity Hall of one of the Universities, for instruction in Theology, Hebrew, and Church History, and for the delivery of so many trial-discourses, one in Latin and the rest in English, at appointed intervals. But, to accommodate students whose means made it difficult for them to reside in town during four consecutive winters, there was a device of “partial sessions,” by which a certain small amount of personal appearance in the Divinity Hall, if protracted over six sessions, and duly signalised by delivery of the required discourses, was accepted as sufficient. By the former plan, Carlyle, entering the Divinity Hall in Edinburgh in the session 1813–14, immediately after his last session in Arts, would have been a qualified probationer or preacher in the Scottish Church, and eligible for a fixed parochial charge, in 1817, _i.e._ in his twenty-second year. The other plan, however, permitting him to find some occupation out of Edinburgh,