During his enforced leisure after the destruction of the first book of the _French Revolution_, Carlyle saw more of his friends, among whom he numbered John Sterling, fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained a clergyman. Sterling was of a 'vehement but most noble nature,' and he was one of the few who had studied _Sartor Resartus_ seriously. He had been also caught by the Radical epidemic on the spiritual side. Although dissenting from much of what Carlyle taught, Sterling recognised in him 'a man not only brilliantly gifted, but differing from the common run of people in this, that he would not lie, that he would not equivocate, that he would say always what he actually thought, careless whether he pleased or offended.' He introduced Carlyle to his father, who was then the 'guiding genius' of the _Times_, and who offered Carlyle work there on the usual conditions. 'Carlyle,' says Froude, 'though with poverty at his door, and entire penury visible in the near future, turned away from a proposal which might have tempted men who had less excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to last was to _truth_, truth as it presented itself to his own intellect and his own conscience.' On the 16th of February 1835 Carlyle wrote to his brother John: 'I positively do not care that periodical literature shuts her fist against me in these months. Let her keep it shut for ever, and go to the devil, which she mostly belongs to. The matter had better be brought to a crisis. There is perhaps a finger of Providence in it.... My only new scheme, since last letter, is a hypothesis--little more yet--about National Education. The newspapers had an advertisement about a Glasgow "Educational Association" which wants a man that would found a Normal School, first going over England and into Germany to get light on that matter. I wrote to that Glasgow Association afar off, enquiring who they were, what manner of man they expected, testifying myself very friendly to their project, and so forth--no answer as yet. It is likely they will want, as Jane says, a "Chalmers and Welsh" kind of character, in which case _Va ben, felice notte_. If otherwise, and they (almost by miracle) had the heart, I am the man for them. Perhaps my name is so heterodox in that circle, I shall not hear at all.'[17] Carlyle also remarks, in the same letter, that John Stuart Mill is very friendly: 'He is the nearest approach to a real man that I find here--nay, as far as negativeness goes, he _is_ that man, but unhappily not very satisfactory much farther.'