Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy of his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great prospects of various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s head reduced to a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is sent off in a wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather indistinctly in three stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:— _Sure ’tis Peter, sure ’tis Peter: Life’s a variorum._ Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[36] was not Carlyle’s element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse altogether, and was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated, which one would not willingly let die, it had been to prose performances that he looked forward when, on bidding farewell to Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for the booksellers” among the employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh. Scientific subjects had seemed the most promising: and among the books before him in “those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were materials for a projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s letter of December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the _Edinburgh Review_, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of Gravitation, of which we hear in the _Reminiscences_. The manuscript, carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject was not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or because editors are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing more was heard of it.