This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance, Carlyle might have languished without literary employment of any kind for a good while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David Brewster, afterwards Sir David. The _Edinburgh Encyclopædia_, which Brewster had begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his twenty-ninth year, and which had been intended to be in twelve volumes, thick quarto, double-columns, had now, in 1820, reached its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther than the letter _M_. Among the contributors had been, or were, these: Babbage, Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel, Dionysius Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor Dunbar, the Rev. Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon, David Irving, Professor Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor Leslie, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. This was very good company in which to make a literary _début_, were it only in such articles of hackwork as might be intrusted conveniently to an unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted to Carlyle were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in just as the poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles continuing the line of some of Campbell’s. _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_, _Montaigne_, _Montesquieu_, _Montfaucon_, _Dr. Moore_, _Sir John Moore_, were his first six, all under the letter _M_, and all supplied in 1820, with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823 he was to contribute ten more, running through the letter _N_, and ending in the sixteenth volume, under the letter _P_, with _Mungo Park_, _William Pitt the Elder_, and _William Pitt the Younger_. It was no bad practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have brought him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to something more for casual bits of translation done for Brewster. More agreeable to himself, and better paid in proportion, may have been two articles which he contributed to the _New Edinburgh Review_, a quarterly which was started in July 1821, by Waugh and Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the previous _Edinburgh Monthly Review_, and which came to an end, as might have been predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823. In the second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an article of 21 pages by Carlyle on _Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends_, to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages on _Goethe’s Faust_.