Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in Literature himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—the very vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray, had discerned his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to which the failure of his successive experiments in established professions had ever since been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had been most importunately urging him in those letters, just quoted, in which, after telling him that, by reason of the asperity and irritating contemptuousness of his manner, he would never be rightly appreciated by his usual appearances in society, or even by his splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his advice in the words “_Some other way is to be sought for._” What Irving meant, and urged at some length, and with great practicality, in those letters, was that Carlyle should at once think of some literary attempts, congenial to his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as possible, and aim at a connection with the _Edinburgh Review_ and _Blackwood_. Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while, turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly impossible that a young man who for five years already had been writing letters to his friends the English style of which moved them to astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read the specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have been exercising his literary powers privately in other things than letters, and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of pieces suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such piece, he tells us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the editor of some magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the descriptive tourist kind,” giving some account of Carlyle’s first impressions of the Yarrow country, so famous in Scottish song and legend, as visited by him in one of his journeys from Edinburgh to Annandale. What became of it he never knew, the editor having returned no answer.[33] Although, after this rebuff, there was no new attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there can be little doubt that he had then a few other things by him, and not in prose only, with which he could have repeated the trial. It is very possible that several specimens of those earliest attempts of his in prose and verse, published by himself afterwards when periodicals were open to him, remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but two have come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title “_Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story_,” but certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended for the press.[34] The other is of more interest to us here, from its