host of despairs and questionings, before its high abstractions could be brought down into a rule for personal behaviour, and wrapt with any certainty or comfort round one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How was that vast Inconceivable related to this little life and its world; or was there no relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible power? What of the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man amid them? What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental groping and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description is that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so much on an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the roots of the conscience and the will. Teufelsdröckh’s mental progress out of the mood of the “Everlasting No” is a succession of _practical determinations as to the conduct of his own spirit_, each determination coming as an inspired effort of the will, altering his demeanour from that moment, and the last bringing him into a final condition of freedom and self-mastery. The effort of the will does indeed diffuse a corresponding change through the intellect; but it is as if on the principle, “Henceforth such and such a view of things _shall_ be my view,”—which is but a variation of the Scriptural principle that it is by doing the law that one comes to know the gospel. The Leith Walk incident, accordingly, is to be taken as the equivalent in Carlyle’s case to that first step out of the “Everlasting No” of which he makes so much in the biography of Teufelsdröckh. It was not by any means his complete conversion or emancipation, but it was a beginning. It was, to use his own words, a change at least “in the temper of his misery,” and a change for the better, inasmuch as it substituted indignation and defiance for what had been mere fear and whimpering. His mood thenceforth, though still miserable enough, was to be less abject and more stern. On the whole, if this construction of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821 does not make so much of it as Mr. Froude’s does, it leaves enough of reason for any Edinburgh youth, when he next chances to be in that straggling thoroughfare between Edinburgh and Leith, to pause near the middle of it, and look about him. The spot must have been just below Pilrig Street, which was Carlyle’s starting-point from his lodgings in Moray Street (now Spey Street) on his way to Leith.