No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of Edinburgh, or of any other city, than the Carlyle of those years. Those great natural faculties, unmistakably of the order called _genius_, and that unusual wealth of acquirement, which had been recognised in him as early as 1814 by such intimate friends as Murray, and more lately almost with awe by Margaret Gordon, had been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still manifest to the discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of them, it is with a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange moodiness of character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness and unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and others had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened themselves into settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word “habit” is misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word pass in the meantime for a state of temper which it would take many words, and some of them much softer and grander, to describe adequately, was an innate and constitutional distinction. It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the contrast between him in this respect and the man who was his immediate predecessor in the series of really great literary Scotsmen. If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain. From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own mother said of him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to deal with”), the prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and bitter broodings, addicted to the black and dismal view of things. With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. A few authentications may be quoted:— _April, 1819._—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I can give no satisfactory account to your friendly inquiries. A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not very strong.”[22]