What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness of spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which he could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return to; he had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as it was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in honourable employments, which many of his compeers in age would have been glad to get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his pocket,—a sum larger than the majority of the educated young Scotsmen about him could then finger, or perhaps ever fingered afterwards in all their lives. All this has to be distinctly remembered; for the English interpretations of Carlyle’s early “poverty,” “hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the Scottish standard of his time, by the standard of say two-thirds of those who had been his fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh, Carlyle’s circumstances so far had been even enviable. The cause of his abnormal unhappiness was to be found in _himself_. Was it, then, his ill-health,—that fearful “dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his twenty-third year, or just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, and which clung to him, as we know, to the very end of his days? There can be no doubt that this was a most important factor in the case. His dyspepsia must have intensified his gloom, and may have accounted for those occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged on hypochondria. But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought along with him from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as he told the blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy and hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach.”[27] In fact, as Luther maintained when he denounced the Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal fellows for their persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” as if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a spiritual kind, the mere pathological explanations which physicians are apt to trust to will not suffice in such instances. What, then, of those spiritual distresses, arising from a snapping of the traditional and paternal creed, and a soul left thus rudderless for the moment, which Luther recognised as the most terrible, and had experienced in such measure himself?