In 1817 he came from Kirkcaldy to put down his name for the theological hall. “Old Dr. Ritchie was ‘not at home’ when I called to enter myself. ‘Good,’ said I, ‘let the omen be fulfilled,’” and he shook the dust of the hall from his feet for evermore. Possibly he muttered something about, “Hebrew old Clo”, if he did, his genius for cutting nicknames carried him away. Through it all no one had greater reverence for the written Word. Carlyle, for good or for ill, was a Calvinist at heart. In the winter of 1823 he was sore beset with the “fiend dyspepsia.” He rode from his father’s house all the way to Edinburgh to consult a specialist. The oracle was not dubious. “It was all tobacco, sir; give up tobacco.” But could he give it up? “Give it up, sir?” he testily replied. “I can cut off my hand with an axe if that should be necessary.” Carlyle let it alone for months, but was not a whit the better; at length, swearing he would endure the “diabolical farce and delusion” no longer, he laid almost violent hands on a long clay and tobacco pouch and was as happy as it was possible for him to be. Perhaps the doctor was right after all. Up to the middle of the last century a strange personage called Peter Nimmo, or more often Sir Peter Nimmo, moved about the classes of Edinburgh University, and had done so for years. Professor Masson in _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_ has told with his wonted care and accuracy what it is possible to know of the subject. He was most probably a “stickit minister” who hung about the classes year after year, half-witted no doubt, but with a method in his madness. He pretended or believed or not unwillingly was hoaxed into the belief that he was continually being asked to the houses of professors and others, where not seldom he was received and got some sort of entertainment. Using Professor Wilson’s name as a passport he achieved an interview with Wordsworth, who described him as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had ever met with.” It was shrewdly suspected that he simply held his tongue, and allowed Wordsworth to do all the talking; a good listener is usually found a highly agreeable person. He tickled Carlyle’s sense of humour, and was made the subject of a poem by the latter in _Fraser’s Magazine_. It was one of the earliest and one of the very worst things that Carlyle ever did. I note in passing that Peter Nimmo had a predecessor or contemporary, John Sheriff by name, who died in August 1844 in his seventieth year. He was widely known as Doctor Syntax, from some fancied resemblance to the stock portrait of that celebrity. He devoted all his time to University class-rooms and City churches, through which he roamed at will as by prescriptive right. He boasted that he had attended more than a hundred courses of lectures; but his great joy was when any chance enabled him to occupy the seat of the Lord High Commissioner in St. Giles’.