between him and his _Alma Mater_ through that session; and we can imagine also some renewed intercourse with Professor Leslie, and an occasional dropping in, as an outsider, at one or other of the class-rooms, to hear a stray lecture. Meanwhile, he found no occupation. Irving, besides his preachings, had an hour or two a day of private mathematical teaching, at the rate of two guineas a month per hour; but nothing of the sort came to Carlyle. Once, indeed, recommended by Nichol, the mathematical schoolmaster of whom we have already heard, he did call on a gentleman who wanted mathematical coaching for some friend; but the result was that the gentleman,—whom he describes in the letter as “a stout, impudent-looking man with red whiskers,”—thought two guineas a month “perfectly extravagant,” and would not engage him. In these circumstances, and as his weekly bills for his lodgings and board amounted to between 15s. and 17s.,—which he thought unreasonable for his paltry accommodations, with badly-cooked food, and perpetual disturbance from the noises of a school overhead,—he resolved to leave Edinburgh, for a time at least, and return to his father’s farmhouse at Mainhill. On the 29th of March 1819 he intimated this intention in a letter to his mother thus:—“A French author, d’Alembert (one of the few persons who deserve the honourable epithet of honest man), whom I was lately reading, remarks that one who has devoted his life to learning ought to carry for his motto ‘_Liberty, Truth, Poverty_,’ for he who fears the latter can never have the former. This should not prevent one from using every honest effort to attain to a comfortable situation in life; it says only that the best is dearly bought by base conduct, and the worst is not worth mourning over. We shall speak of all these matters more fully in summer; for I am meditating just now to come down to stay a while with you, accompanied with a cargo of books, Italian, German, and others. You will give me yonder little room, and you will waken me every morning about five or six o’clock. Then _such_ study! I shall delve in the garden too, and, in a word, become not only the wisest, but the strongest, man in those regions. This is all _claver_, but it pleases one.”[18]