No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more encouragingly to him than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some of Irving’s letters that we gather the information that certain peculiarities in Carlyle’s own demeanour were understood to be operating against his popularity even within the limited Edinburgh circle in which he did for the present move. “Known you must be before you can be employed,” Irving writes to him in December 1819. “Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a winning, attaching, accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most favourable. It convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse. They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical, unthinking drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter. Therefore, my dear friend, _some other way is to be sought for_.”[30] In a letter in March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is, my dear Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of it, but your feelings and affections; which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of mind.”[31] This is Margaret Gordon’s advice over again; and it enables us to add to our conception of Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh struggling and obstruction the fact of his fearlessness and aggressiveness in speech, his habit even then of that lightning rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with sarcasms and stinging contempts falling mercilessly upon his auditors themselves, which characterised his conversation to the last. This habit, or some of the forms of it, he had derived, he thought, from his father.[32]