Now that everything has been written that is likely to be written by those claiming to possess personal knowledge of the subject, let us take up the volumes, and likewise the scattered fragments, and seek to penetrate the mystery of the most ill-assorted couple known to modern literature.

It is not necessary to bring to light, and in regular order, the external history of Thomas Carlyle, or of Jane Baillie Welsh, who married him.  There is an extraordinary amount of rather fanciful gossip about this marriage, and about the three persons who had to do with it.

Take first the principal figure, Thomas Carlyle.  His life until that time had been a good deal more than the life of an ordinary country-man.  Many persons represent him as a peasant; but he was descended from the ancient lords of a Scottish manor.  There was something in his eye, and in the dominance of his nature, that made his lordly nature felt.  Mr. Froude notes that Carlyle’s hand was very small and unusually well shaped.  Nor had his earliest appearance as a young man been commonplace, in spite of the fact that his parents were illiterate, so that his mother learned to read only after her sons had gone away to Edinburgh, in order that she might be able to enjoy their letters.

At that time in Scotland, as in Puritan New England, in each family the son who had the most notable “pairts” was sent to the university that he might become a clergyman.  If there were a second son, he became an advocate or a doctor of medicine, while the sons of less distinction seldom went beyond the parish school, but settled down as farmers, horse-dealers, or whatever might happen to come their way.

In the case of Thomas Carlyle, nature marked him out for something brilliant, whatever that might be.  His quick sensibility, the way in which he acquired every sort of learning, his command of logic, and, withal, his swift, unerring gift of language, made it certain from the very first that he must be sent to the university as soon as he had finished school, and could afford to go.

At Edinburgh, where he matriculated in his fourteenth year, he astonished every one by the enormous extent of his reading, and by the firm hold he kept upon it.  One hesitates to credit these so-called reminiscences which tell how he absorbed mountains of Greek and immense quantities of political economy and history and sociology and various forms of metaphysics, as every Scotsman is bound to do.  That he read all night is a common story told of many a Scottish lad at college.  We may believe, however, that Carlyle studied and read as most of his fellow students did, but far beyond them, in extent.

When he had completed about half of his divinity course, he assured himself that he was not intended for the life of a clergyman.  One who reads his mocking sayings, or what seemed to be a clever string of jeers directed against religion, might well think that Carlyle was throughout his life an atheist, or an agnostic.  He confessed to Irving that he did not believe in the Christian religion, and it was vain to hope that he ever would so believe.