Eloquence of the Month.

THOMAS CARLYLE ON BOOKS, STUDY, LIFE, AND DUTY.

[In the closing months of 1858 we presented our readers with a paper entitled, "Thomas Carlyle: a Literary Biography, and a Criticism," and since that time we have regularly noticed and analysed his "Frederick the Great" as it appeared. Our readers, therefore, do not require any notice at our hands here of the chief events in the life of the Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh. This speech, however, has a somewhat unique attraction from its being an eloquent, wise, affectionate, and affecting address, delivered by a writer of books, who, during upwards of a quarter of a century, has abstained from public speech, who makes no pretension to the character of an orator, and who had to bear upon his memory his own many utterances of condemnation against speech not to be followed by action, as well as bear up against his own great true fame as an author. It was essentially an extempore address; the matter studied, the manner and style left to the afflatus of the hour. The inspiration of genius did not fail him in his great venture. He may feel now again, as he did when he closed his orations on "Heroes and Hero Worship" in May, 1840,-" there was pleasure for me in this business, if also much pain;" but we hope the former quite overbalanced the latter while the great good of the utterance of a large and noble heart, a cultured and disciplined spirit, lies before the world for its benefit, in its influences on the young, bright, happy souls who heard it, as well as on that wide-spread multitude who read it with reverent love. With the exception of one or two sentences-of an illustrative character-the speech will be found entire, and we are certain its appearance here will be found entirely satisfactory. The address was delivered to the students of the University of Edinburgh and the most distinguished per sonages in the northern metropolis, in the midst of the pomp and circumstance in which the inhabitants of Edina delight, on the 2nd of April, under the presidency of Principal Sir D. Brewster, Bart., who introduced his former collaborateur and friend as Lord Rector.]

Mr. CARLYLE said-Gentlemen, I have accepted the office you have elected me to, and now return thanks for the great honour done me. Your enthusiam towards me, I admit, is very beautiful in itself, however undesirable it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when I was in a position analogous to your own. I can only hope that it may endure to the end-that noble desire to honour those whom you think worthy of honour-and come to be more and more select and discriminate in the choice of the object of it, for I can well understand that you will modify your opinions of me and many things else as you go on. There are now fifty-six years gone last November since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen, to attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I knew not what, with feelings of wonder and awestruck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to. There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see

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the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land rising up and saying, "Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard; you have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges." As the old proverb says, He that builds by the wayside has many masters." We must expect a variety of judges; but the voice of young Scotland through you is really of some value to me, and I return you many thanks for it, though I cannot describe my emotions to you; and perhaps they will be much more conceivable if expressed in silence. When this office was first proposed to me I was not very ambitious to accept it. I was taught to believe that there were, more or less, certain important duties which would lie in my power. This, I confess, was my chief motive in going into it; at least, in reconciling the objections felt to such things; for, if I can do anything to serve you and my dear old alma mater, why should I not do so? You may depend upon it that, if any duty does arise, I will do my most faithful endeavour to do whatever is right and proper, according to the best of my judgment. In the meantime, the duty I have at present is to address some words to you on subjects cognate to the pursuits you are engaged in. In fact, I meant to throw out some observations-the truths I have in me-about the business you are engaged in, the race you have started on, what kind of race it is you young gentlemen have begun, and what sort of arena you are likely to find in this world. Advices I believe to young men, and to all men, are very seldom much valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful performing. And talk that does not end in action is better suppressed altogether. But there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the summary of all advices. It is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or not, viz., that above all things the interest of your own life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day, in this place where you have come to get education. Diligent! That includes all virtues that a student can have. I mean to include in it all qualities that lead to the acquirement of real instruction and improvement in such a place. If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seedtime of life, in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will indeed arrive at little; while in the course of years, when you come to look back, if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers-and among many counsellers there is wisdom-you will bitterly repent when it is is too late. The habits of study acquired at universities are of the highest importance in after life. When you are young the whole mind is as it were fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into; but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man. By diligence, among other things and very chiefly, I mean honesty in all your inquiries. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavour to do that. Keep an accurate separation of what you have really come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all that on the bypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it is stamped on your mind so that you may survey it on all sides with intelligence. There is such a thing as a man endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does not know more than the outside skin of them, and he goes flourishing about with them. There is also a process called cramming in some universities,-getting up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put questions about. Avoid all that, as entirely unworthy of an honourable habit. Be modest, and humble, and diligent in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying

to bring you forward in the right way, so far as they have been able to understand it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. In fact, morality as regards study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything real, and it would be greatly better if he were tied up from doing any such thing. He does nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters.

I dare say you know that it is now 700 years since universities were first set up in this Europe of ours. Abelard and others had risen up, with doctrines in them the people wished to hear of, and students flocked towards them from all parts of the world. There was no getting the thing recorded in books, as you may now. You had to hear him speaking to you vocally, or else you could not learn at all what it was that he wanted to say. And so they gathered together the various people who had anything to teach, and formed themselves gradually, under the patronage of kings and other potentates who were anxious about the culture of their populations-nobly anxious for their benefit-and became a university. Perhaps you have heard that all that is greatly altered by the invention of printing, which took place about midway between us and the origin of universities. A man has not now to go to where a professor is actually speaking, because in most cases he can get his doctrine out of him through a book, and can read it and read it again and again, and study it. Nevertheless, universities have and will continue to have an indispensable value in society-a very high value. I consider the very highest interests of man vitally entrusted to them. In regard to theology, as you are aware, it has been the study of the deepest heads that have come into the world, What is the nature of this stupendous universe, and what its relations to all things, as known to man, and as only known to the awful Author of it. It remains, however, a curious truth, that the main use of universities of the present age is that, after you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a collection of books,—a great library of good books, which you proceed to study and to read. What the universities have mainly done-what I found the universities did for me-was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading. And learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading-to read all kind of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the present time, in a great deal of reading incumbent on you, you must be guided by the books recommended to you by your professors for assistance. And when you get out of the university, and go into studies of your own, you will find it very important that you have selected a field, a province, in which you can study and work. The most unhappy of all men is the man that cannot tell what he is going to do, that has got no work cut out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind-honest work, which you intend getting done.

If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice-perhaps the best you could get is to take to a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book. It is analogous to what doctors tell us about the physical health and appetites of the patient. You must learn to distinguish between false appetite and real.

A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for-what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to read history-to inquire into what has passed before you in the families of men. The history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all concern you; and you will find all the knowledge you have got will be extremely applicable to elucidate that. There you have the most remarkable race of men in the world set before you, to say nothing of the languages, which, I believe, are admitted to be the most perfect order of speech we have yet found to exist among men. And you will find, if you read well, a pair of extremely remarkable nations shining in the records left by themselves as kinds of pillars to light up life in the darkness of the past ages; and it will be well worth your while if you can get into the understanding of what these people were and what they did. You will find a great deal of hearsay, as I have found, that does not touch on the matter; but perhaps some of you will get to see a Roman face to face; you will know, in some measure, how they contrived to exist, and to perform these feats in the world. I believe, also, you will find a thing not much noted, that there was a great deal of deep religion in both nations. That is noted by the wisest of historians, and particularly by Ferguson, who is well worth reading on Roman history. His book is a very creditable book. He points out the profoundly religious nature of the Roman people, notwithstanding the wildness and ferociousness of their nature. They believed that Jupiter Optimus, Jupiter Maximus, was Lord of the universe, and that he had appointed the Romans to become the chief of men, provided they followed his commands; to brave all difficulty, and to stand up with an invincible front-to be ready to do and die; and also to have the same sacred regard to veracity, to promise, to integrity, and all the virtues that surround that noblest quality of man-Courage-to which the Romans gave the name of virtue, manhood, as the one thing ennobling for a man. In the literary ages of Rome, that had very much decayed away; still it had retained its place among the lower classes of the Roman people. Of the deeply religious nature of the Greeks, along with their beautiful and sunny effulgences of art, you have a striking proof, if you look for it. In the tragedies of Sophocles there is a most distinct recognition of the eternal justice of heaven, and the unfailing punishment of crime against the laws of God. I believe you will find in all histories that that has been at the head and foundation of them all. No nation that did not contemplate this wonderful universe with an awestricken and reverential feeling that there was a great unknown, omnipotent, and an all-wise and allvirtuous Being, superintending all men in it, and all interests in it-no nation ever came to very much (nor did any man either), who forgot that. If a man did for

get that, he forgot the most important part of his mission in this world.

In our own history, which you will take a great deal of pains to make yourselves acquainted with, you will find it beyond all others worthy of your study; because I believe that the British nation produced a finer set of men than you will find it possible to get anywhere else in the world. I don't know in any history of Greece or Rome where you will get an Oliver Cromwell. And we have had men worthy of memory in our little corner of the island here, and our history has been connected with world history-for, if you examine well, you will find that John Knox was the author, as it were, of Oliver Cromwell; that the Puritan revolution would never have taken place in England at all had it not been for that Scotchman. That is an authentical fact, and is not prompted by national vanity on my part. And it is very possible, if you look at the struggle that was going on in England, as I have had to do in my time, you will see that people were overawed with the immense impediments lying in the way. A small minority of God-fear

ing men in the country were flying away, with any ship they could get, to New England, rather than take the lion by the beard. They dared not confront the powers with their most just complaint to be delivered from idolatry. They wanted to make the nation altogether comformable to the Hebrew Bible, which they understood to be the will of God; and there could be no aim more legitimate. However, they could not have got their desire fulfilled at all if John Knox had not succeeded by the firmness and nobleness of his mind. For he is also of the select of the earth to me-John Knox. What he has suffered from the ungrateful generatious that have followed him should really make us humble ourselves to the dust to think that the most excellent man our country has produced, to whom we owe everything that distinguishes us among modern nations, should have been sneered at and abused by people. Knox was heard by Scotland-the people heard him with the marrow of their bones-they took up his doctrine, and they defied principalities and powers to move them from it. "We must have it," they said. It was at that time the Puritan struggle arose in England, and you know well that the Scottish Earls and nobility, with their tenantry, marched away to Dunse Hill, and sat down there; and just in the course of that struggle, when it was either to be suppressed or brought into greater vitality, they encamped on the top of Dunse Hill-thirty thousand armed men, drilled for that occasion, each regiment around its landord, its Earl, or whatever he might be called, and eager for Christ's Crown and Covenant. That was the signal for all England rising up into unappeasable determination to have the gospel there also, and you know it went on and came to be a contest whether the Parliament or the King should rule-whether it should be old formalities and use and wont, or something that had been of new conceived in the souls of men—namely, a divine determination to walk according to the laws of God here, as the sum of all prosperity—which of these should have the mastery; and after a long, long agony of struggle, it was decided-the way we know.

I should say also of that Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell's-notwithstanding the abuse it has encountered, and the denial of everybody that it was able to get on in the world, and so on-it appears to me to have been the most salutary thing in the modern history of England on the whole. If Oliver Cromwell had continued it out, I don't know what it would have come to. It would have got corrupted perhaps in other hands, and could not have gone on; but it was pure and true to the last fibre in his mind-there was truth in it when he ruled over it. Well Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, or Dictatorate if you will, lasted for about ten years, and you will find that nothing that was contrary to the laws of heaven was allowed to live by Oliver. For example, it was found by his Parliament, called "Barebones"—the most zealous of all Parliaments probably, that the Court of Chancery in England was in a state really capable of no apology-no man could get up and say that that was a right court. There were, I think, fifteen thousand, or fifteen hundred-I really don't remember which, but we shall call it by the last -there were fifteen hundred cases lying in it undecided; and one of them, I remember, for a large amount of money, was eighty-three years old, and it was going on still. Wigs were waving over it, and lawyers were taking their fees, and there was no end of it, upon which the Barebones people, after deliberation about it, thought it was expedient, and commanded by the Author of Man and the Fountain of Justice, and for the True and Right, to abolish the court. Really, I don't know who could have dissented from that opinion. At the same time, it was thought by those who were wiser, and had more experience of the world, that it was a very dangerous thing, and would never suit at all. The lawyers began to make an immense noise about it. All the public, the great mass of solid and well-disposed people who had got no deep insight into such matters, were very adverse to it; and the president of it-old Sir Francis Rouse-who translated the Psalms