Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have their due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the main and all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in those Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a scabbard, a noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies and ambitions measuring itself against common souls and against social obstructions, and all but frantic for lack of employment. Schoolmastering he had given up with detestation; the Church he had given up with indifference; the Law had begun to disgust him, or was seeming problematical. Where others could have rested, happy in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle could not. What was this Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which he was living, the solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on speaking terms with those that were considered her magnates, the very best of whom he was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary, to vanquish and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant glare round Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this innocent and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the throat and compel to listen. Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some elucidation with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel for conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive atmosphere, not of vulgar _mauvaise honte_, though such it is generally esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit from nature, and which are mostly due to the undefined station I have hitherto occupied in society.”[28] Again, to a correspondent in March 1820, “The fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the grand whole in this best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,—with just one observation more, which I throw out for your benefit, should you ever come to need such an advice. It is to keep the profession you have adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty ideas of honour and uprightness which a studious secluded life naturally begets, will in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if friends and other aids are wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow leaf.”[29] These feelings were known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s despondency over his poor social prospects, his enormous power of complaint, or, as the Scots call it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar a topic with them as with his own family.