The Annan mathematical mastership lasted about two years, or from the autumn of 1814 to the autumn of 1816, bringing Carlyle from his nineteenth year to his twenty-first. His receipts were between £60 and £70 a year; and he boarded in the house of Mr. Glen, the Burgher minister of Annan, where he read prodigiously at nights in all sorts of books, latterly sitting up till three in the morning over Newton’s _Principia_. But, though the Glens were pleasant, kind people, and he was not far from his father’s house, and had two or three good friends in the neighbourhood,—one of them the Rev. Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, a man of many accomplishments, and the real founder of Savings Banks,—he found himself, on the whole, “lonesome, uncomfortable, and out of place.” His character among the Annan people was that of “morose dissociableness,” and he detested his school-work. The two visits which he paid to Edinburgh in the course of the two years were bright interruptions in his dull routine. The first was about the Christmas of 1814, only a few months after he had gone to Annan. His purpose was to read the first of his trial-discourses in the Divinity Hall,—that being, as we have supposed, his second session in Divinity, and one of the two sessions in which, as we have seen, his name occurs in the Divinity Hall lists. The discourse was an English sermon on the text (Psalm cxix. 67): “_Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now have I kept Thy Word._” It was, he says, “a very weak, flowery, and sentimental piece,”—which we may believe if we like. The second visit was in the Christmas-time of 1815, for the delivery of his second discourse, a Latin exegesis on the question, “_Num detur Religio Naturalis?_” (“Is a Natural Religion possible?”) This too, he supposes, was “weak enough,” though the writing of the Latin had given him some satisfaction, and there had been some momentary pleasure in “the bits of compliments and flimsy approbation from comrades and professors” which greeted this performance, as indeed had been the case with the previous year’s sermon. But this visit of the Christmas of 1815 was memorable to him for something more than the delivery of his exegesis. That trouble off his mind, he was taking a holiday week, and looking up old Edinburgh acquaintances; and it was one night, when he was in Rose Street, sitting rather silently in the rooms of a certain Waugh, a distant cousin of his own, and his predecessor in the Annan mastership, that the door opened, and there stepped in Edward Irving, accompanied by an Edinburgh mathematical teacher named Nichol. Carlyle had once seen Irving casually long before in the Annan schoolroom, when Irving called there as a former boy of the school, home from the University with prizes and honours; he had heard much of Irving since,—especially of his continued University triumphs and his brilliant success in schoolmastering, first in the new academy he had set up in Haddington, and more recently in a