Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment and impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest approaches to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of Irving, whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn meetings and strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in Irving’s visits now and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the westward excursions, when the two friends were on Drumclog Moss, and were talking together in the open air on that battle-field of the Covenanters, that the good Irving wound from Carlyle the confession that he no longer thought as Irving did of the Christian Religion. This was in 1820. More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to Edinburgh, in June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to Haddington, and introduced him, at the house of the widowed Mrs. Welsh, to that lady’s only child, Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former pupil, and thought of by him as not impossibly to be his wife even yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement interfered, she was not quite twenty years of age, but the most remarkable girl in all that neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form, features pretty rather than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale, black hair over a finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant black eyes, she had an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or culture, to be the feminine match of either of the two men that now stood before her.——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the wife of Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as she appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse, the now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh, she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on the dense slope down from the University to the back of the Canongate; and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old Haddington nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not quite so old as I had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she talked of her recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and these, as near as possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was young, she was a fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he _cam_ aboot her. Then there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then there was Maister Carlyle himsel’; and _he_ cam to finish her off, like. I’m told he’s a great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in London.”——That was certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there stood before the graceful