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PD
PrettyDarnedQuick

^
Statistics
Third Edition

Geoffrey R . Norman
David L . Streiner
 PDQ* SERIES

ACKERMANN

PDQ PHYSIOLOGY

BAKER, MURRAY

PDQ BIOCHEMISTRY

CASSILETH et al.

PDQ INTEGRATIVE ONCOLOGY

CORMACK

PDQ HISTOLOGY

DAVIDSON

PDQ MEDICAL GENETICS

INGLE

PDQ ENDODONTICS, 2/e

 JOHNSON

PDQ PHARMACOLOGY, 2/e

KERN

PDQ HEMATOLOGY

McKIBBON, WILCZYNSKI

PDQ EVIDENCE-BASED PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE,

2/e

NORMAN, STREINER

PDQ STATISTICS, 3/e

STREINER, NORMAN

PDQ EPIDEMIOLOGY, 3/e

SCHLAGENHAUF-LAWLOR, FUNK-BAUMANN

PDQ TRAVELERS' MALARIA

SCIUBBA

PDQ ORAL DISEASE

*PDQ (Pretty Darned Quick)
 PDQ
Statistics

Third Edition

GEOFFREY R. NORMAN, PhD

Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario

DAVID L. STREINER
Professor of Psychiatry
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario

2003
PMPH USA
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
CARY, NORTH CAROLINA
 PMPHUSA
Publishing to Advance
the Practice of Medicine

PMPH USA, Ltd.

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Tel: 919-502-4220
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© 2003 Geoffrey R. Norman and David L. Streiner

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publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
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Notice: The authors and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the patient care
recommended herein, including choice of drugs and drug dosages, is in accord with the accepted
standard and practice at the time of publication. However, since research and regulation constantly
change clinical standards, the reader is urged to check the product information sheet included in the
package of each drug, which includes recommended doses, warnings, and contraindications. This is
particularly important with new or infrequently used drugs. Any treatment regimen, particularly one
involving medication, involves inherent risk that must be weighed on a case-by-case basis against the
benefits anticipated. The reader is cautioned that the purpose of this book is to inform and enlighten;
the information contained herein is not intended as, and should not be employed as, a substitute for
individual diagnosis and treatment.
 This book is dedicated to the tens of thousands of
individuals who purchased copies of the first
and second editions, and to the many who wrote to
tell us how much they enjoyed the book. It is these
people who inspired us to write a third edition.

Thank you.
Preface to Third Edition
The second edition of PDQ Statistics came out 11 years after the
first, and now the third edition appears on the scene only 5 years after
the second. Has the pace of change in statistics grown so much that it’s
halved the time necessary for bringing out a new edition? Not really. The
majority of what we’ve added has been around for a decade or three.
What’s changed is us. Now that all of the kids are grown and out of our
homes (at least, we hope so), we have more time for pursuits other than
dealing with minor and not-so-minor adolescent crises; things like carpentry
(GRN), woodworking (DLS), traveling (both of us), and—when there’s any
time left over—learning some new statistical techniques. So, much of the
new stuff (hierarchical and logistic regression, path analysis, and structural
equation modeling) is what we’ve been playing with these last few years.

The other change is that both computer programs and journals have become
more sophisticated, so it’s not unusual to come across these techniques in
clinical articles. Also, editors and grant review panels have (finally) become
aware of the problems of missing data, so that topic has also been added to
this edition.

What hasn’t changed is the style. We’ve continued to keep equations to an

absolute minimum (to stress concepts rather than math) and to assume that
humor isn’t antithetical to learning (and may in fact enhance it) and that
people who get hung up on political correctness will have already
heard about us and won’t be reading this book. So if you feel you need
humorless and politically correct dry math, return this book and get a refund.
For the rest of you, enjoy!

G.R.N.

D.L.S.
January 2003
 Table of Contents
Cover
PDQ* SERIES
Copyright
Preface to Third Edition
Introduction
Part One Variables and Descriptive Statistics
1 Names and Numbers: Types of Variables
2 Describing Data
Part Two Parametric Statistics
3 Statistical Inference
4 Comparison of Means of Two Samples: The t
Test
5 Comparison among Many Means: Analysis of
Variance
6 Relationship between Interval and Ratio
Variables: Linear and Multiple Regression
7 Analysis of Covariance
8 Variations on Linear Regression: Logistic
Regression, General Linear Model, and
Hierarchical Linear Models
9 Time Series Analysis
Part Three Nonparametric Statistics
10 Nonparametric Tests of Significance
 11 Nonparametric Measures of Association
12 Advanced Nonparametric Methods
Part Four Multivariate Statistics
13 Introduction to Multivariate Statistics
14 Multivariate Analysis of Variance
15 Discriminant Function Analysis
16 Exploratory Factor Analysis
17 Path Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling
18 Cluster Analysis
19 Canonical Correlation
20 Reprise
21 Research Designs
Index
Unabashed Glossary
Introduction
Warning: This is not an introductory textbook in statistics. Introductory
textbooks imply that you will go on to intermediate textbooks and then to
advanced textbooks. As a result, introductory textbooks usually deal with
only a few of the topics in the discipline. So if you want to apply your
introductory knowledge of statistics to examining journals, most of the topics
used by researchers won’t have been covered.

Introductory textbooks have a couple of other problems. By and large, they

are written by experts with the hope of enticing others to become experts, so
they are written in the language of the discipline. Now it is certainly an
important goal to understand the jargon; in most cases, once you get beyond
the language, things get a bit simpler. But jargon can be an impediment to
learning. Also, beginning textbooks usually are written on the assumption
that the only way you can understand an area is to plunge up to your neck in
the nitty-gritty details of equation-solving, theoremproving, or number-
juggling. At some level, that’s probably legitimate. We ’re not sure we’d like
a surgeon who hasn’t actually removed an appendix to perform this
procedure, even though he or she has a good conceptual grasp of the relevant
anatomy and operating procedures. But we are going to assume that all that
work is not necessary to understand an area, so we’ll try to minimize the use
of algebra, calculus, and calculations, and we’ll use ordinary English as much
as possible.

The intent of this book is to help you through the results section of a research
article where the numbers are actually crunched, and little asterisks or “p <
.05” values appear as if by magic in the margins, to the apparent delight of
the authors. We think that by reading this book, you won’t actually be able to
do any statistics (actually, with computers on every street corner, no one—
doctor, lawyer, beggarman, or statistician—should have to do statistics), but
you will understand what researchers are doing and may even be able to tell
when they’re doing it wrong. There is an old joke about the three little French
boys, ages 4, 5, and 6, who saw a man and a woman naked on a bed in a
basement apartment. They said:

Four-Year-Old-Boy: Look at that man and that woman in there! They are
wrestling!

Five-Year-Old-Boy: No silly, they are making love.

Six-Year-Old-Boy: Yes, and very poorly, too!

The 4-year-old boy knew nothing of lovemaking. The 5-year-old boy had
achieved a conceptual understanding, and the 6-year-old boy understood
lovemaking sufficiently well, presumably without actually having done it, to
be a critical observer. The challenge of this book will be to turn you into a 6-
year-old statistician. So, we will not take the “Introductory Textbook”
approach in this book. Instead, we will expose you to nearly every kind of
statistical method you are likely to encounter in your reading. Our aim is to
help you understand what is going on with a particular approach to analysis,
and furthermore, we hope you will understand enough to recognize when the
author is using a method incorrectly. Along the way, you can leave the
calculator on the back shelf, because it won’t be needed.

One cautionary note: It would be nice if we could hand you an encyclopedia

of statistical tests so you could just turn to page whatever and read about the
particular test of interest. But statistics isn’t quite like that. Like most things
in science, it is built up logically on fundamental principles and evolves
gradually to greater complexity. To gain some appreciation of the underlying
concepts, it probably behooves you to start at the beginning and read to the
end of the book at least once.

We hope that as a result of reading this book you will find the results section
of journal articles a little less obscure and intimidating and thereby become a
more critical consumer of the literature. It would not be surprising if you
emerged with a certain degree of skepticism as a result of your reading.
However, it would be unfortunate if you ended up dismissing out of hand any
research advanced statistical methods simply because of your knowledge of
the potential pitfalls. Keep in mind that the objective of all statistical analyses
is to reveal underlying systematic variation in a set of data, either as a result
of some experimental manipulation or from the effect of other measured
variables. The strategy, which forms the basis of all statistical tests, is a
comparison between an observed effect or difference and the anticipated
results of random variation. Like a good stereo receiver, statistical analysis is
designed to pluck a faint signal out of a sea of noise.

Unfortunately, also like a modern stereo receiver, the statistical methods are
contained in black boxes like SPSS and SAS; prominent stickers proclaim
that they should be opened by qualified personnel only so that it is nearly
impossible to understand the detailed workings of a MANOVA, factor
analysis, or logistic regression program. Finally, to complete the analogy,
these boxes of software seem replete with endless switches and dials in the
form of obscure tests or optional approaches, which may be selected to
execute the programs and report the results.

It is understandable that many people in the research community react toward

new statistical methods in the same way that they might react to other new
technology; either they embrace the techniques openly and uncritically, or
they reject any examples out of hand. Neither response is appropriate. These
methods, available now through the development of sophisticated computer
hardware and software, have made an enormous contribution to research in
the social and health sciences. Nevertheless, they can be used appropriately
or they can be abused, and the challenge that faces the reader is to decide
whether a particular example is one or the other.

Let us say ahead of time what statistics cannot do to help place this book in
an appropriate context.

The probability or “p” level associated with any test of significance is only a
statement of the likelihood that an observed difference could have arisen by
chance. Of itself, it says nothing about the size or importance of an effect.
Because probability level is so closely related to sample size, small effects in
large studies can achieve impressive levels of significance. Conversely,
studies involving small numbers of subjects may have too little power to
detect even fairly large effects.
No statistical method can effectively deal with the systematic biases that may
result from a poorly designed study. For example, statistical techniques may
be used to adjust for initial differences between two groups, but there is no
way to ensure that this adjustment compensates exactly for the effect of these
differences on the results of the study. Similarly, no statistical analysis can
compensate for low response rates or high dropouts from a study. We can
demonstrate ad nauseam that the subjects who dropped out had the same age,
sex, marital status, education, and income as those who stayed in, but this is
no guarantee that they would have been comparable to the variables that were
measured in the study. The mere fact that they dropped out implies that they
were different on at least one dimension, namely the inclination to remain in
the study. Finally, no measure of association derived from natural variation in
a set of variables, however strong, can establish with certainty that one
variable caused another. To provide you with some tools to sort out the
different experimental designs, we have included a critical review of the
strengths and weaknesses of several designs in Chapter 18.

Finally, even after you are satisfied that a study was conducted with the
appropriate attention to experimental design and statistical analysis and that
the results are important, there remains one further analysis that you, the
reader, can conduct. Whether you are a researcher or clinician, you must
examine whether the results are applicable to the people with whom you deal.
Are the people studied in the research paper sufficiently similar to your
patients that the effects or associations are likely to be similar? For example,
treatments that have significant effects when applied to severely ill patients in
a university teaching hospital may be ineffective when used to treat patients
with the same, albeit milder, form of the disease that is encountered in a
general practice. Similarly, psychological tests developed on university
undergraduates may yield very different results when applied to a middle-
aged general population. The judgment as to the applicability of the research
results to your setting rests primarily on the exercise of common sense and
reasoning, nothing more.

One last word about the intent of this book. Although we would like think
that a good dose of common sense and an understanding of the concepts of
statistics will enable you to examine the literature critically, we’re going to
hedge our bets a bit. Throughout the book we highlight particular areas where
researchers frequently misuse or misinterpret statistical tests. These are
labeled as “C.R.A.P.* Detectors,” with apologies to Ernest Hemingway,† and
are intended to provide particular guides for you to use in reviewing any
study. In applying your new knowledge, don’t be intimidated by all the tables
of numbers and hifalutin talk. Always keep in mind the advice of Winifred
Castle, a British statistician, who wrote that “We researchers use statistics the
way a drunkard uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination.”
Finally, we hope that you enjoy the book!

G.R.N

D.L.S.

May 1986

*Convoluted Reasoning or Antiintellectual Pomposity

†Postman N, Weingartner C. Teaching as a subversive activity. New York:

Dell; 1987.
 Part One
Variables and
Descriptive Statistics
 1
Names and Numbers:
Types of Variables

There are four types of variables. Nominal and ordinal variables consist of
counts in categories and are analyzed using "nonparametric" statistics.
Interval and ratio variables consist of actual quantitative measurements
and are analyzed using "parametric" statistics.

Statistics provide a way of dealing with numbers. Before leaping

headlong into statistical tests, it is necessary to get an idea of how these
numbers come about, what they represent, and the various forms they can
take.

Let’s begin by examining a simple experiment. Suppose an investigator has a

hunch that clam juice is an effective treatment for the misery of psoriasis. He
assembles a group of patients, randomizes them to a treatment and control
group, and gives clam juice to the treatment group and something that looks,
smells, and tastes like clam juice (but isn’t) to the control group. After a few
weeks, he measures the extent of psoriasis on the patients, perhaps by
estimating the percent of body involvement or by looking at the change in
size of a particular lesion. He then does some number crunching to determine
if clam juice is as good a treatment as he hopes it is.

Let’s have a closer look at the data from this experiment. To begin with, there
are at least two variables. A definition of the term variable is a little hard to
come up with, but basically it relates to anything that is measured or
manipulated in a study. The most obvious variable in this experiment is the
measurement of the extent of psoriasis. It is evident that this is something that
can be measured. A less obvious variable is the nature of treatment—drug or
placebo. Although it is less evident how you might convert this to a number,
it is still clearly something that is varied in the course of the experiment.

A few more definitions are in order. Statisticians frequently speak of

independent and dependent variables. In an experiment, the independent
variables are those that are varied by and under the control of the
experimenter; the dependent variables are those that respond to
experimental manipulation. In the current example, the independent variable
is the type of therapy—clam juice or placebo—and the dependent variable is
the size of lesions or body involvement. Although in this example the
identification of independent and dependent variables is straightforward, the
distinction is not always so obvious. Frequently, researchers must rely on
natural variation in both types of variables and look for a relationship
between the two. For example, if an investigator was looking for a
relationship between smoking and lung cancer, an ethics committee would
probably take a dim view of ordering 1,000 children to smoke a pack of
cigarettes a day for 20 years. Instead, the investigator must look for a
relationship between smoking and lung cancer in the general adult population
and must assume that smoking is the independent variable and that lung
cancer is the dependent variable; that is, the extent of lung cancer depends on
variations in smoking.

There are other ways of defining types of variables that turn out to be
essential in determining the ways the numbers will be analyzed. Variables are
frequently classified as nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio (Figure 1-1). A
nominal variable is simply a named category. Our clam juice versus placebo
is one such variable, as is the sex of the patient, or the diagnosis given to a
group of patients.
 Types of variables
1
4T
Qualitative Quantitative
I V I
Independent
T Dependent
Nominal Interval ( reflux ) ( proton pump
(sex, marital ( 36° - 38°C) inhibitor
status ) versus placebo )
Ordinal Ratio
( stage of cancer, ( pulse rate,
pain rating) vital capacity)

Figure 1-1 Types of variables.

An ordinal variable is a set of ordered categories. A common example in

the medical literature is the subjective judgment of disease staging in cancer,
using categories such as stage 1, 2, or 3. Although we can safely say that
stage 2 is worse than stage 1 but better than stage 3, we don’t really know by
how much.

The other kinds of variables consist of actual measurements of individuals,

such as height, weight, blood pressure, or serum electrolytes. Statisticians
distinguish between interval variables, in which the interval between
measurements is meaningful (for example, 32° to 38°C), and ratio variables,
in which the ratio of the numbers has some meaning. Having made this
distinction, they then analyze them all the same anyway. The important
distinction is that these variables are measured quantities, unlike nominal and
ordinal variables, which are qualitative in nature.

So where does the classification lead us? The important distinction is

between the nominal and ordinal variables on one hand and the interval and
ratio variables on the other. It makes no sense to speak of the average value
of a nominal or ordinal variable—the average sex of a sample of patients or,
strictly speaking, the average disability expressed on an ordinal scale.
However, it is sensible to speak of the average blood pressure or average
height of a sample of patients. For nominal variables, all we can deal with is
the number of patients in each category. Statistical methods applied to these
two broad classes of data are different. For measured variables, it is generally
assumed that the data follow a bell curve and that the statistics focus on the
center and width of the curve. These are the so-called parametric statistics.
By contrast, nominal and ordinal data consist of counts of people or things in
different categories, and a different class of statistics, called nonpara-metric
statistics (obviously!), is used in dealing with these data.

C.R.A.P. DETECTORS

Example 1-1

To examine a program for educating health professionals in a sports injury clinic

about the importance of keeping detailed medical records, a researcher does a
controlled trial in which the dependent variable is the range of motion of injured
joints, which is classified as (a) worse, (b) same, or (c) better, and the
independent variable is (a) program or (b) no program.

Question. What kind of variables are these—nominal or ordinal? Are they

appropriate?

Answer. The independent variable is nominal, and the dependent variable, as

stated, is ordinal. However, there are two problems with the choice. First,
detailed medical records may be a good thing and may even save some lives
somewhere. But range of motion is unlikely to be sensitive to changes in
recording behavior. A better choice would be some rating of the quality of
records. Second, range of motion is a nice ratio variable. To shove it into
three ordinal categories is just throwing away information.
 C.R.A.P. Detector I-1
Dependent variables should be sensible. Ideally, they should be clinically
important and related to the independent variable.

C.R.A.P. Detector I-2

In general, the amount of information increases as one goes from nominal to
ratio variables. Classifying good ratio measures into large categories is akin
to throwing away data.
 2
Describing Data

A key concept in statistics is the use of a frequency distribution to reflect

the probability of the occurrence of an event. The distribution can be
characterized by measures of the average—mean, median, and mode—and
measures of dispersion—range and standard deviation.

Once a researcher has completed a study, he or she is faced with

some major challenges: to analyze the data in order to publish, to add a line
to the CV, to get promoted or tenured, to get more research grants, and to
analyze more data.

There are two distinct steps in the process of analyzing data. The first step is
to describe the data by using standard methods to determine the average
value, the range of data around the average, and other characteristics. The
objective of descriptive statistics is to communicate the results without
attempting to generalize beyond the sample of individuals to any other group.
This is an important first step in any analysis. For a reader to understand the
basis for the conclusions of any study, an idea of what the data look like is
necessary.

The second step in some, but not all, studies is to infer the likelihood that the
observed results can be generalized to other samples of individuals. If we
want to show that clam juice is an effective treatment for psoriasis, or that
intelligence (IQ) is related to subsequent performance, we are attempting to
make a general statement that goes beyond the particular individuals we have
studied. The rub is that differences between groups can rarely be attributed
simply to the experimental intervention; some people in the clam juice group
may get worse, and some people in the placebo group may get better. The
goal of inferential statistics is to determine the likelihood that these
differences could have occurred by chance as a result of the combined effects
of unforeseen variables not under the direct control of the experimenter. It is
here the statistical heavy artillery is brought to bear. As a result, most damage
to readers of journals is inflicted by inferential statistics. Most of this book is
devoted to the methods of statistical inference. However, a good idea of what
the data look like is a necessary prerequisite for complex statistical analysis,
both for the experimenter and the reader, so let’s start there.

FREQUENCIES AND DISTRIBUTIONS

Whether a study involves 10 or 10,000 subjects, the researcher eventually

ends up with a collection of numbers, often glorified by names such as “data
set” or “database.” In the case of nominal or ordinal variables, the numbers
are an indicator of the category to which each subject belongs (for example,
the sex, the religion, or the diagnosis of each subject). For interval and ratio
variables, the researchers will have the actual numerical value of the variable
for each subject—the subject’s height, blood pressure, pulse rate, or number
of cigarettes smoked. There is a subtle difference among these latter
variables, by the way, even though all are ratio variables. Things like height
and blood pressure are continuous variables; they can be measured to as
many decimal places as the measuring instrument allows. By contrast,
although the average American family has 2.1 children, no one has ever
found a family with one-tenth of a child, making counts such as these
discrete variables.

In either case, these numbers are distributed in some manner among the
various categories or throughout the various possible values. If you plotted
the numbers, you would end up with distributions similar to those shown in
Figures 2-1 and 2-2.

Figure 2-1 Distribution of ice cream preferences in 10,000 children.

Note that there are a couple of things that can be done to make these figures
more understandable. If we divide the numbers in each category by the total
number of people studied, we are then displaying the proportion of the total
sample in each category, as shown on the right side of each graph. Some
manipulations can be performed on these proportions. For example, to find
the probability in Figure 2-2 that one of our folks is 69 or 70 years old, we
must add up the probabilities in these 2-year categories. We can also address
questions such as “What is the probability that a senior citizen is more than
71 years of age?” by adding the categories above age 71 years.

The basic notion is that we can view the original distribution of numbers as
an expression of the probability that any individual chosen at random from
the original sample may fall in a particular category or within a range of
categories. This transformation from an original frequency distribution to a
distribution of probability is a recurrent and fundamental notion in statistics.

Although a frequency distribution is a convenient way to summarize data, it

has certain disadvantages. It is difficult to compare two distributions derived
from different samples because the information is buried in the number of
responses in each category. It’s also tedious to draw graphs and a lot easier to
get the computer to blurt out a series of numbers. As a result, some way to
summarize the information is necessary. The conventional approach is to
develop standard methods that describe where the center of the distribution
lies and how wide the distribution is.

Figure 2-2 Age distribution of 10,000 entrants in senior citizen roller derby.

MEASURES OF THE MIDDLE: MEANS, MEDIANS, AND

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classical cities,—what are they all to me?
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.

They conveyed him back by slow stages, seeing this and that
continental sight on his homeward-route, but hardly knowing what
he saw. He was in London again for a week or two in June and July
1832, attended medically in a hotel in Jermyn Street. Brought thence
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hotel in St. Andrew Square, in a state of utter unconsciousness; and
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through the old familiar scenery he began to recognise places and
objects, and to mutter their names,—Gala Water, Buckholm,
Torwoodlee; and, when they approached Abbotsford itself, and he
caught sight of its towers, he sprang up in such a state of excitement
that they could hardly hold him in the carriage. “Ha! Willie Laidlaw!
O man, I have often thought of you,” were his first words, after his
old friend and amanuensis Laidlaw, who was waiting in the porch,
had assisted the rest in carrying him into the house, and seating him
in a chair in the dining-room. The return of consciousness which this
recognition signified became more and more marked, at least at
intervals, in the two months and ten days through which he still
lingered. He talked with those of his family who were about him,
could be shifted from room to room or even wheeled in a Bath chair
through parts of his grounds, and could listen to readings and seem
to take an interest in them. Once he insisted on being placed at his
writing-table, with paper, pens, and ink before him in the
accustomed order, and wanted to be left to himself; but, when the
pen had been put into his hand and his fingers refused to hold it,
tears trickled down his cheeks, and he gave up the attempt. There
were, as often in such cases of brain-paralysis, some days of almost
frantic vehemence, when it was painful to be near him; but these
were succeeded by a feeble quietude and a gradual ebbing-away of
life. On the 21st of September 1832, with the ripple of the Tweed
heard by those who stood round his bed, Sir Walter Scott, then only
in the sixty-second year of his age, breathed his last.
 In the Diary itself the narrative of those closing years of Scott’s
life is broken short at the point where they were bringing him back
from Italy as a dying invalid. The last few months are a total blank in
the Diary; where, indeed, the entries for the later years of the
included seven are scantier and more intermittent than those for the
earlier. But it is not solely as an exact autobiographic record of the
incidents of so many memorable years of a memorable life that the
Diary is now of interest. Implicated in that main interest, and
catching the attention of the reader again and again as he advances
through the pages, are certain recurring particular informations as to
Scott’s character and ways which possess an independent interest,
and may be reverted to separately.
Bound up, for example, with the proofs furnished by the Diary of
Scott’s prodigious literary industry, there is plenty of minute
information as to his habits of composition and his rate of
composition. I do not like that word “composition” in any such
application, thinking it a miserable word for the description of the
process by which a great writer marshals the contents of his mind
and commits them to paper; but the word is current, and may serve
for the nonce. Well, Scott’s rate of composition was about the fastest
known in the history of literature. Of all his predecessors in the
literary history of the British Islands, Shakespeare seems to have
been the likest to him in this particular of fluent facility and swiftness
of production. “His mind and hand went together,” is the well-known
report concerning Shakespeare by his literary executors and editors:
“his mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered
with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his
papers.” One has an impression, however, that Shakespeare, with all
his facility when he had the pen in his hand, had it less constantly in
his hand, was less “eident” in the use of it (as our good northern
phrase goes), than Scott,—whether because he had less actual need
to be “eident,” or because verse, which was Shakespeare’s main
element, is intrinsically more difficult, takes more out of a man in a
given time, and so is less favourable to “eidency,” than the prose
element in which, latterly, Scott worked all but exclusively. At all
events, “eidency” and “facility” taken together, the result, in the mere
matter of quantity, was larger from Scott’s industry than from
Shakespeare’s. But it is with the “facility” that we are now concerned,
and with the proofs of this “facility” which are furnished by the
Journal in particular. The mere look of the handwriting is one of
these,—that rapid currente calamo look, without hesitation, and with
hardly an erasure, stoppage to point, or any such thing, and with the
words almost running into each other in their hurry, which is
familiar to all who have seen facsimile reproductions of any portions
of the copy of Scott’s novels, when they were written with his own
hand, and not dictated. That, however, is a characteristic common to
all his writings; and the specific interest of the Diary in this
connection is that it gives us definite information as to the amount of
writing per day which Scott usually got through in his currente
calamo style. In entry after entry there is note of the number of
pages he had prescribed to himself as a sufficient day’s “task” or
“darg,” with growls when for any reason he had fallen short of it, and
smiles of satisfaction when he had exceeded it; and from one entry
we ascertain that his maximum per day when he was in good vein
was eight pages of his own close manuscript, making forty pages of
the usual type in which his copy was set up by the printers. One can
compute the difference between that rate and any other rate of which
one may happen to have knowledge or experience; but there is no
need to conclude that Scott’s rate is to be passionately desired or
universally aimed at, or that, because it suited Scott, it would suit
others. On the contrary, one sees some disadvantages, even in Scott’s
own case, counterbalancing the advantages of such extreme rapidity.
He was aware of the fact himself; and he once quotes, with some
approbation, an admirable maxim of Chaucer on the subject:—
“There n’ is no werkman, whatsoever he be,
That may both werken well and hastily.”

That Scott was an exception,—that he was, like Shakespeare, one of

those workmen who could work both well and hastily,—was owing
doubtless to the fact that, in this also resembling Shakespeare, he
brought always to the act of writing a mind already full of matter,
and of the very kinds of matter required for his occasions. One has
but to recollect the extraordinary range and variety of his readings
from his earliest youth, the extraordinary range and variety also of
his observations of men and manners, and the extraordinary
retentiveness of his memory, to see that never since he had begun
authorship could he have had to spin, as so many have to do, the
threads of his ideas or imaginations out of a vacuum. At the same
time, and this notwithstanding, there is something more to be said,
when the comparison is between Scott as an exceptionally rapid
worker and Shakespeare as the same. Scott had a standard of the
kind of matter that would answer for the purposes of his literary
productions; and, though a very good standard, it was lower than
Shakespeare’s standard for his writings. When Shakespeare was in
the act of writing, or was meditating his themes by himself in the
solitude of his chamber, or in his walks over the fields, before he
proceeded to the act of writing, we see his mind rolling within itself,
like a great sea-wash that would rush through all the deeps and
caverns, and search through all the intricacies, of its prior structure
and acquisitions,—so ruled and commissioned, however, that what
the reflux should fetch back for use should not be any wreckage
whatsoever that might be commonly relevant and interesting, but
only things of gleaming worth and rarity, presentable indeed to all,
but appreciable in full only by kings and sages. Hear, on the other
hand, in Scott’s own words, the definition of what satisfied him in his
dealings with the public. “I am sensible,” he wrote, “that, if there be
anything good about my poetry, or prose either, it is a hurried
frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young
people of bold and active disposition.” That Scott was grossly unfair
to himself in this under-estimate will be the verdict now of universal
opinion; and I shall have to touch again upon that point presently.
Meanwhile there is one other difference to be noted between the two
men in respect of that very circumstance of their marked similarity
in one characteristic which has led us to view them together.
Shakespeare’s boundless ease and fluency in writing did not prevent
perfection in his literary execution. His grammar, with all its
impetuosity and lightness of spring, is logical and accurate to the
utmost demands of the most fastidious English scholarship; and,
though he would have repudiated with scorn the name “stylist,”
invented of late as a title of literary honour by some of our critics,
and it would be profane to think of him under that execrable and
disastrous appellation, he wrote always with the sure cunning of a
disciplined artist in verbal expression,—an artist so highly self-
disciplined that his art in such matters had become an instinct.
Scott’s habitual style, on the other hand,—his style when he is not
strongly moved either by vehement feeling or by high poetic
conception,—is a kind of homely and comfortable slipshod,
neglectful of any rule of extreme accuracy, and careless even of the
most obvious grammatical solecisms. It is not exactly with reference
to this difference between himself and Shakespeare that there occurs
in one passage in his Diary a protest against being compared with
Shakespeare at all. But the protest is worth quoting. “Like
Shakespeare!” he exclaims, noticing the already formed habit of this
perilous comparison among his most ardent admirers in his own
lifetime,—“like Shakespeare! Not fit to tie his brogues!” It was the
superlative of compliment on Scott’s side; but its very wording may
be construed into a certain significance in connection with that point
of dissimilarity between the two men to which I have just adverted.
Shakespeare never wore “brogues.” In our present metaphorical
sense, I mean; in the literal sense, I would not be sure but he may
have found such articles convenient quite as often as Scott did. There
were muddy roads about Stratford-on-Avon as well as about
Abbotsford.
It would be wrong not to mention, however briefly, the
confirmation furnished by the Journal of all our previous
impressions of Scott’s high excellence among his fellow-men, not
only in the general virtues of integrity, honour, courage, and
persevering industry, but also in all those virtues which constitute
what we call in a more particular sense goodness. “Great and good”
is one of our common alliterative phrases; and it is a phrase which
we seem to require when we would characterise the kind of human
being that is entitled to supreme admiration. We feel that either
adjective by itself would be inadequate in such a case, but that the
doubling suffices. Another of our alliterative phrases, nearly the
same in meaning at root, is “head and heart.” Only when there is a
conjunction in a human being of what we call “heart” with what we
call “intellect” are we quite satisfied even in cases of ordinary
experience; and only when there is the conjunction of “great heart”
with “great intellect” do we bow down with absolute veneration
before this man or that man of historical celebrity. Common and
simple though this word “heart” is, there is a world of unused
applicability in it yet in many directions. In the criticism of literature,
for example, it supplies a test that would make havoc with some high
reputations. There have been, and are, writers of the most
indubitable ability, and of every variety of ability, in whose writings,
if you search them through and through, though you may find
instruction in abundance, novelties of thought in abundance, and
amusement in abundance, you will find very little of real “heart.”
There is no such disappointment when you turn to Scott.
Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about
him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve others
when he could, utter absence of envy or real ill-will,—these are
qualities that shine out everywhere in his life and in the succession of
his writings, and that receive, though they hardly need, additional
and more intimate illustration in his Journal. Positively, when I
contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how
free he was all through his life from those moral weaknesses which
sometimes accompany and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in
this species of excellence,—for, born though he was in an old Scottish
age of roughish habits and not over-squeamish speech, and carrying
though he did the strong Scottish build of that age, and somewhat of
its unabashed joviality, to the very last, his life was exemplary
throughout in most particulars of personal conduct,—positively, I
say, with all this in my mind, I can express my feeling about Scott no
otherwise than by declaring him to have been one of the very best
men that ever breathed.
Of the interest of the miscellaneous contents of the book, as
including individual incidents in Scott’s life, sketches of the
physiognomies and characters of his Edinburgh contemporaries and
London contemporaries, descriptions of scenes and places, curious
Scottish and other anecdotes, literary criticisms, and expressions of
Scott’s opinions on public questions and on men and things in
general, no adequate idea can be formed except from itself. As to
Scott’s opinions on all the various questions, public or private, on
which he had occasion to make up his mind and express what he felt,
we may venture on one general remark. They are shrewd opinions,
and often or generally just,—the judgments of a man of strong
natural sagacity, and mature business-experience, adhering in the
main to use and wont, but ready for an independent consideration of
exigencies as they arose, and for any clear and safe improvement.
Even in politics, though his partisanship in that department was
obdurate, avowed, unflinching, and sometimes uproarious, his
shrewdness in the forecast of what was possible, or his private
determination in favour of what he thought just and desirable, led
him sometimes,—especially where Scottish nationality was
concerned, and the Thistle seemed to be insulted,—into dissent from
his party, and the proclamation of opinions peculiarly his own. It is
when we leave the plain ground of such practical and everyday
questions, and either ascend to those higher levels, or descend to
those deeper, at which the human intellect finds its powers more
hardly tasked,—it is then that we observe what is usually reckoned a
defect in Scott in comparison with many who have been far inferior
to him in other intellectual respects. There was little in his mind of
what may be called the purely noetic organ, that faculty which
speculates, investigates, deals with difficult problems of science or
philosophy, and seeks in every subject for ultimate principles and a
resting-ground of final conclusions. He either refrained from such
exercises of mind entirely, or was content with proximate and easily
accessible axioms. Even in literary criticism, where he might be
supposed to have been most at home, it is sagacious extempore
judgments that he offers, honest expressions of his own immediate
likings or dislikings, rather than suggestions or deductions from any
code of reasoned principles. So in matters of higher and more
solemn concern. From that simpler kind of philosophy which has
been defined as a constant Meditation of Death Scott did not refrain,
because no good or serious man can. There is evidence in his Journal
that in his solitary hours he allowed himself often enough to lapse
into this profoundest of meditations, and rolled through his mind the
whole burthen of its everlasting mysteries. But the inscrutable for
Scott, in this subject as in others, began at a short distance from his
first cogitations or his inherited creed. “I would, if called upon, die a
martyr for the Christian Religion,” he writes once in his Diary; and
no one can doubt that the words were written with the most earnest
sincerity. But, when we interpret them duly by the light of other
passages, and of all that we know independently, it is as if we saw
Scott standing upright with flushed face and clenched hands, and
saying to those about him who might want to trouble him too much
on so sacred a subject,—“This is the faith that has been transmitted
to us from far-back generations; this is the faith in which millions of
abler men than I am, or than you are, have lived and died; I hold by
that faith, without seeking too curiously to define it or to discuss its
several tenets; and, if you come too near me, to pester me with your
doubts and questionings, and new inquiries and speculations, and all
the rest of your clever nineteenth-century metaphysics, I warn you
that the soul of all my fathers will rise in me, and I shall become
dangerous.” In plainer words, on this subject, as on others, it was in
Scott’s constitution to rest in that kind of wisdom which declines
thinking beyond a certain distance.
Here, again, and in a new connection, we come round to
Shakespeare. In him, no one needs to be reminded, the noetic faculty
existed in dimensions absolutely enormous, working wonderfully in
conjunction with his equally enormous faculty of imagination, and
yet with the incessant alertness, the universal aggressiveness, and
the self-enjoying mobility, of a separate mental organ. Hence those
glances from heaven to earth and to the underworld which earth
conceals, those shafts of reasoned insight into the roots of all things,
those lightning gleams of speculation to its last extreme, that wealth
of maxims of worldly prudence outrivalling and double-distilling the
essence of all that is in Bacon’s Essays, those hints and reaches
towards an ultimate philosophy both of nature and of human life,
which have made Shakespeare’s writings till now, and will make
them henceforth, a perennial amazement. Well, after what has just
been said of Scott, are we bound, on this account, to give up the
customary juxtaposition of the two men? Hardly so, I think; for there
is a consideration of some importance yet in reserve. I will introduce
it by a little anecdote taken from the Journal itself.
People are still alive who have had personal acquaintance with
Miss Stirling Graham,—the lady who died as recently as 1877 at the
venerable age of ninety-five years, and who, some fifty or sixty years
before that, was famous in Edinburgh society for what were called
her mystifications. These consisted in her power of assuming an
imaginary character (generally that of an old Scottish lady), dressing
up in that character, appearing so dressed up unexpectedly in any
large company in a drawing-room, or even in the private study of
some eminent lawyer or judge, and carrying on a long rigmarole
conversation in the assumed character with such bewildering effect
that her auditor or auditors were completely deceived, and supposed
the garrulous intruder to be some crazy eccentric from a country-
house or some escaped madwoman. It was on the 7th of March 1828
that Sir Walter Scott witnessed, in the house of Lord Gillies, after
dinner, one of those “mystifications” of Miss Stirling Graham; and he
describes it in his Journal thus:—“Miss Stirling Græme, a lady of the
Duntroon family, from whom Clavers was descended, looks like
thirty years old, and has a face of the Scottish cast, with a good
expression in point of good sense and good-humour. Her
conversation, so far as I have had the advantage of hearing it, is
shrewd and sensible, but noways brilliant. She dined with us, went
off as if to the play, and returned in the character of an old Scottish
lady. Her dress and behaviour were admirable, and her conversation
unique. I was in the secret, of course, and did my best to keep up the
ball; but she cut me out of all feather. The prosing account which she
gave of her son, the antiquary, who found an auld wig in a slate-
quarry, was extremely ludicrous; and she puzzled the Professor of
Agriculture with a merciless account of the succession of crops in the
parks around her old mansion-house. No person to whom the secret
was not entrusted had the least guess of an imposture, except one
shrewd young lady present, who observed the hand narrowly, and
saw that it was plumper than the age of the lady seemed to warrant.”
From a note appended to this entry by Mr. Douglas we learn what Sir
Walter said to Miss Stirling Graham on this occasion, by way of
complimenting her on her performance after it was over. “Awa’,
awa’!” he said; “the Deil’s ower grit wi’ you.” There was, he saw,
something supernatural in her when she was in the mood and
attitude of her one most congenial function. All the gifts that were
latent in the shrewd and sensible-looking, but noways brilliant lady,
flashed out upon others, and were revealed even to herself, in the act
of her personations.
With the lesson in our minds which this little story supplies, we
may return to the matter of Scott’s reputed deficiency in the
speculative or purely noetic faculty:—Noetic faculty! Noetic
fiddlestick! This faculty, with a score of others perhaps for which our
meagre science of mind has no names, you will find in Scott too, if
you know how to look for them. When and where would you have
looked for the noetic faculty in Nelson? Not, certainly, as he was to
be seen in common life, a little man of slouching gait, with his empty
right arm-sleeve pinned to his breast, and gravely propounding as an
unanswerable argument in his own experience for the immateriality
of the soul the fact that, though there was now an interval of half a
yard from the stump of his lost arm and the place where his fingers
had been, he could still sometimes feel twitches of rheumatism in
those merely spectral finger-tips. No! but see him on his own great
wooden three-decker, as he was taking her into action between the
enemy’s lines, when the battle-roar and the battle-flashes had
brought the electric shiver through his veins, and he stood among his
sailors transmuted into the real Nelson, seamanship incarnate and a
fighting demigod! So, with the necessary difference for the purpose
now in view, in the case of Scott. His various faculties of intellect
were involved inextricably somehow in that imaginative faculty
which he did possess, and also in enormous degree, in common with
Shakespeare. When Scott was engaged on any of his greater works,—
a Lay of the Last Minstrel, a Marmion, a Lady of the Lake, a
Waverley, a Guy Mannering, an Antiquary, an Old Mortality, a
Heart of Midlothian, an Ivanhoe, or a Redgauntlet,—when he was so
engaged, and when the poetic phrenzy had seized him strongly,—
then what happened? Why, then that imaginative faculty which
seemed to be the whole of him, or the best of him, revealed itself
somehow as not a single faculty, but a complex composition of
various faculties, some of them usually dormant. This it did by
visibly splitting itself, resolving itself, into the multiplicity of which it
was composed; and then the plain everyday man of the tall upright
head, sagacious face, and shaggy eyebrows, was transmuted, even to
his own surprise, into a wizard that could range and speculate,—
range and speculate incalculably. It was, I say, as if then there were
loosened within him, out of his one supposed faculty of phantasy, a
simultaneous leash of other faculties, a noetic faculty included, that
could spring to incredible distances from his ordinary self, each
pursuing its appropriate prey, finding it, seizing it, sporting with it,
and coiling it back obediently to the master’s feet. In some such way,
I think, must be explained the splendour of the actual achievements
of Scott’s genius, the moderate dimensions of his purely reasoning
energy in all ordinary circumstances notwithstanding. His reasoning
energy was locked up organically, let us say, in his marvellous
imagination. And so, remembering all that Scott has left us,—those
imperishable tales and romances which no subsequent successes in
the British literature of fiction have superseded, and by the glamour
of which his own little land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
formerly of small account in the world, has become a dream and
fascination for all the leisurely of all the nations,—need we cease,
after all, from thinking of him in juxtaposition, due interval allowed,
with England’s greatest man, the whole world’s greatest man, of the
literary order, or abandon the habit of speaking of Sir Walter Scott as
our Scottish Shakespeare?
 CARLYLE’S EDINBURGH LIFE[9]

PART I.—1809–1818
Early in November 1809 two boys walked together from
Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh, to attend the classes in
the University there. The distance, as the crow flies, is about sixty
miles; and the boys took three days to it. The elder, who had been at
College in the previous session, and therefore acted as the guide,
generally stalked on a few paces ahead, whistling an Irish tune to
himself. The younger, who was not quite fourteen years of age, and
had never been out of Dumfriesshire before, followed rather wearily,
irritated by the eternal Irish tune in front of him, but mainly given up
to his own “bits of reflections in the silence of the moors and hills.”
The elder of the two boys was a Thomas Smail, afterwards of some
note as a Burgher minister in Galloway; the younger was Thomas
Carlyle.
Of the arrival of the two boys in Edinburgh on the 9th of
November 1809, after their third day’s walk of twenty miles, and of
Carlyle’s first stroll, that afternoon, under Smail’s convoy, through
some of the main streets, to see the sights, one may read in his own
Reminiscences. What he remembered best of that first stroll was the
look of the Old High Street, with St. Giles’s Kirk on one side and the
old Luckenbooths running up the middle in its broadest part, but
chiefly the amazing spectacle to which he was introduced when Smail
pushed open a door behind St. Giles’s Kirk, and he found himself in
the outer house of the Court of Session, amid the buzz of the lawyers
and others walking up and down, with the red-robed judges hearing
cases in their little throned enclosures.
 Content with the description of that first stroll, he leaves us to
imagine how, in the first days and weeks of his residence in the city,
he gradually extended his acquaintance with it by further rambles,
and by inspection of this and that interesting to a young stranger.
The task is not difficult. The lodging which Smail and he had taken
between them was, he says, “a clean-looking, most cheap lodging,” in
the “poor locality” called Simon Square. The locality still survives
under that name, though hardly as a square any longer, but only a
poor street, at the back of Nicolson Street, on the left hand as one
goes southwards from the University, and accessible most directly by
an arched passage called Gibb’s Entry. From that obscure centre, by
walks from it in the mornings, and returns to it during the day and in
the evenings, we can see the little Dumfriesshire fellow gradually
conquering for himself some notion of the whole of that Edinburgh
into which he had come. It was the old Edinburgh, of less than
100,000 inhabitants, which we think of so fondly now as the
Edinburgh of Scott before his novels had been heard of and when his
fame depended chiefly on his poems, of Jeffrey in the early heyday of
his lawyership and editorship of the Edinburgh Review, and of the
other local celebrities, Whig and Tory, immortalised in tradition and
in Cockburn’s Memorials.
It was chiefly of the externals of the city that the boy was making
his notes; for the living celebrities, as he tells us, were hardly even
names to him then. Scott and Jeffrey, he says, may have been in the
peripatetic crowd of wigged and gowned lawyers he had seen in the
hall of the Parliament House on the day of his arrival; but the only
physiognomy he had marked there so as to know it again was that of
John Clerk of Eldin. A reminiscence which I have heard from his own
lips enables me, however, to connect his first days in Edinburgh with
the memory of at least one Edinburgh worthy of a still elder
generation. It was on the 18th of December 1809, or just six weeks
after Carlyle’s arrival in Edinburgh, that the well-known Dr. Adam,
Rector of the High School, died; and I have heard Carlyle tell how the
event impressed him, and how he went to see the funeral procession
of the old scholar start from the High School yard at the foot of
Infirmary Street. With a number of other boys, he said, he hung on
by the railings outside, looking in upon the gathered assemblage of
mourners. He seemed to remember the scene with peculiar
vividness; for, after picturing himself as a boy hanging on by the
High School railings, and watching the incidents within, he added,
“Ay me! that moment then, and this now, and nothing but the
rushing of Time’s wings between!”[10] He had a liking to the last for
old Dr. Adam. I have heard him say that any Scotsman who was at a
loss on the subject of shall and will would find the whole doctrine in
a nutshell in two or three lucid sentences of Dr. Adam’s Latin
Grammar; and I had an idea at the time that he had used this brief
precept of Dr. Adam’s little book in his own early practice of English.
At the date of Dr. Adam’s death Carlyle had been for six weeks a
student in the University, with pupils of Dr. Adam among his fellow-
students on the same benches. One can see his matriculation
signature, “Thomas Carlyle,” in his own hand,—a clear and good
boyish hand, differing considerably from that which he afterwards
wrote,—in the alphabetically arranged matriculation list of the Arts
Students of the session 1809–10. It is the sixth signature under the
letter C, the immediately preceding signature being that of a
Dumfries youth named “Irvine Carlyle” (spelt so, and not “Irving
Carlyle,”) of whom there is mention in the Reminiscences. It is clear
that the two Carlyles were drawn to each other by community of
name and county, if not by kin, and had gone up for matriculation
together.
The College of those days was not the present complete
quadrangle, but a chaotic jumble of inconvenient old class-rooms,
with only parts of the present building risen among them, and
finished and occupied. The classes which Carlyle attended in his first
session were the 1st Humanity Class, under Professor Alexander
Christison, and the 1st Greek Class, under Professor George Dunbar.
From an examination of the records I find that among his class-
fellows in both classes were the aforesaid Irving Carlyle, and Lord
Inverurie, afterwards seventh Earl of Kintore, and that among his
class-fellows in the 1st Greek Class was the late venerable Earl of
Wemyss, then Lord Elcho. Neither from the records nor from the
Reminiscences can anything be gathered of the history of the two
classes through the session, or of the place taken in each by the
young Dumfriesshire boy among the medley of his fellow-students,
from 150 to 200 in number. The Latin class-room, we do learn from
the Reminiscences, was a very dark room, so that Professor
Christison, having two students of the name of Carlyle, never
succeeded in distinguishing the one from the other; which was all the
harder, Carlyle thought, because the other Carlyle, Mr. Irving
Carlyle, was not only different physically, being “an older,
considerably bigger boy, with red hair, wild buck teeth, and scorched
complexion,” but was also the worst Latinist in the whole class.
Carlyle himself had been so well grounded in Latin at Annan School
that probably he could have held his own in the class even against
Dr. Adam’s pupils from the Edinburgh High School. To the end of his
life, at all events, he was a fair Latinist. To Greek he never in later life
made any pretence; and whatever Greek he did learn from Dunbar,—
which can have been but small in quantity,—must have faded
through disuse. He retained, however, a high admiration for the
Elementa Linguæ Græcæ of Dr. James Moor of Glasgow,—which
was, I suppose, the Greek grammar then used in Dunbar’s class,—
thinking it the very best grammar of any language for teaching
purposes he had ever seen.
While we know so little of Carlyle’s Greek and Latin studies in
his first University session, it is something to know that he was a
pretty diligent reader of books that session from the College Library.
Having examined a dusty old folio of the library receipts and
outgoings, which chances to have been preserved, I am able to report
that Carlyle had duly paid, before December 1809, his deposit or
security of one guinea, entitling him to take books out, and that, in
that month and the succeeding month of January 1810, he had out
the following books, in parcels or in succession, in the following
order:—Robertson’s History of Scotland, vol. ii.; Cook’s Voyages;
Byron’s Narrative, i.e. “the Hon. John Byron’s Narrative of the Great
Distresses suffered by Himself and his Companions on the Coast of
Patagonia, 1740–6”; the first volume of Gibbon; two volumes of
Shakespeare; a volume of the Arabian Nights; Congreve’s Works;
another volume of the Arabian Nights; two volumes of Hume’s
England; Gil Blas; a third volume of Shakespeare; and a volume of
the Spectator. This is a sufficiently remarkable series of volumes for
a boy of fourteen to have had out from the College library; and other
books from other libraries may have been lying at the same time on
the table in the small room in Simon Square which he shared with
Tom Smail. What is most remarkable is the run upon books of
voyages and travels, and on classic books of English literature, or
books of mere literary amusement, rather than on academic books.
Clearly there had been a great deal of previous and very
miscellaneous reading at Ecclefechan and Annan, with the already
formed result of a passion for reading, and very decided notions and
tastes as to the kinds of books that might be worth looking after. But
how, whether at Ecclefechan or in Annan, had the sedate boy been
attracted to Congreve?
At the close of Carlyle’s first college session in April 1810 he
returned to Ecclefechan. He was met on the road near the village, as
he tells us so touchingly in his Reminiscences, by his father, who had
walked out, “with a red plaid about him,” on the chance of seeing
Tom coming; and the whole of the vacation was spent by him at
home in his father’s house. It is not, therefore, till the beginning of
the session of 1810–11 that we again hear of him in Edinburgh. He
then duly matriculated for his second session, his signature again
standing in the alphabetical Arts matriculation-list immediately after
that of his namesake “Irving Carlyle” (now spelt so). His classes for
this session were the 1st Mathematical Class, under Professor John
Leslie, and the Logic Class, under Professor David Ritchie; and I
have found no note of his having gone back that year, or any other,
for a second course of Latin from Professor Christison. In the 1st
Mathematical Class, consisting of seventy students, he had again
Irving Carlyle on the benches with him; in the Logic Class, consisting
of 194 students, the same Irving Carlyle was one of his fellow-
students, and the late Earl of Wemyss was another. What he made of
the Logic Class we have not the least intimation; and it is only by
inference that we know that he must have distinguished himself in
the Mathematical Class and given evidences there of his unusual
mathematical ability. As before, however, he found variation, or
diversion, from his work for the classes by diligent reading in his
lodgings. Between Saturday the 1st December 1810 and Saturday 9th
March 1811, I find, he took from the University library the following
books in the following order:—Voyages and Travels, the 15th volume
of some collection under that name; a volume of Fielding’s works; a
volume of Smollett; Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind; a book
called Scotland Described; two more volumes of Fielding’s works;
Locke’s Essay in folio; another volume of Fielding; a volume of
Anacharsis, i.e., of an English Translation of the Abbé Barthélémy’s
Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece during the middle of the
Fourth Century before the Christian Era; and a volume of some
translation of Don Quixote. His choice of books, it will be seen, is still
very independent. Reid’s Inquiry and Locke’s Essay connect
themselves with the work in the Logic Class; but the other volumes
were evidently for mere amusement. Whether it was still in the
lodging in Simon Square, and with Smail for his chum, that these
books were read, is uncertain. His comradeship with Smail
continued, indeed, he tells us, over two sessions; but the lodging may
have been changed. It was still, doubtless, somewhere near the
University.
For the session of 1811–12 the Matriculation Book is not
alphabetically in Faculties, but general or mixed for the three
Faculties of Arts, Law, and Medicine. There were 1475 students for
those three Faculties conjointly; and “Thomas Carlyle, Ecclefechan,”
appears among them, his matriculation number being 966. That
session, his third at the University, he attended the 2d Greek Class,
under Dunbar, the 2d Mathematical Class, under Leslie, and the
Moral Philosophy Class, under Dr. Thomas Brown. In the Greek
Class, which consisted of 189 students, he had among his class-
fellows the late venerable Sir Robert Christison, Sir Robert’s twin-
brother, Alexander Christison, the late Earl of Wemyss again, his
brother, the Honourable Walter Charteris, a Thomas Murray from
Kirkcudbrightshire, afterwards a well-known citizen of Edinburgh,
the inextinguishable Irving Carlyle, and an Andrew Combe, whom I
identify with the subsequently well-known Dr. Andrew Combe, the
brother of George Combe the phrenologist. In the Mathematical
Class, which numbered forty-six, there were several Dumfriesshire
students besides himself; and it was in this 2d Mathematical Class, if
the tradition is correct, that Carlyle took the first prize,—another
Dumfriesshire youth, who lived in the same lodging with him, taking
the second. I have turned with most interest, in this session, to the
“List of Students attending Dr. Thomas Brown’s Class,” preserved in
the peculiarly neat, small handwriting of Dr. Brown himself. It was
the second session of Brown’s full tenure of the Professorship of
Moral Philosophy in succession to Dugald Stewart, and the fame of
his lectures was at its highest. The class consisted of 151 students;
and among them, besides Carlyle and his inseparable Irving Carlyle,
and a Robert Mitchell and a Paulus Aemilius Irving, both from
Dumfriesshire, there were Duncan McNeill, afterwards Lord
Colonsay, his brother, John McNeill, Sir Andrew Agnew, David
Welsh, afterwards Dr. David Welsh and Professor of Church History,
and a James Bisset from Aberdeenshire, whom I identify with the
late Rev. Dr. Bisset of Bourtie. Some of these were outsiders, already
in the Divinity or Law Classes, who had returned to the Moral
Philosophy Class for the benefit of Dr. Brown’s brilliant lectures,—
notably young David Welsh, who had already attended the class for
two sessions, but was full of enthusiasm for Brown, whose
biographer and editor he was to be in time. Carlyle, I am sorry to say,
was not one of the admirers of the brilliant Brown. Over and over
again I have heard him speak of Brown, and always with mimicry
and contempt, as “a finical man they called Brown, or sometimes
Missy Brown, that used to spout poetry.” This can hardly have been
out of disregard for metaphysics as such, for he had much respect for
Dugald Stewart, the then retired professor. The dislike seems to have
been partly personal, partly to the new kind of highly ingenious
metaphysics which Brown was trying to substitute for the older and
more orthodox Scottish Philosophy of Reid and Stewart. At all
events, it is worthy of note that those brilliant lectures of Thomas
Brown, which James Mill and John Stuart Mill admired so much in
their published form, regarding them as an introduction to much
that is best in modern British Philosophy, had no effect, in their
actual delivery, on the hard-headed young Carlyle, but fell upon him
as mere dazzle and moonshine.
As Carlyle tells us incidentally that he was in Edinburgh in the
summer of 1812, it is to be supposed that he spent less of that
vacation than usual in his Dumfriesshire home. I find also that he
matriculated rather late in our books for the session of 1812–13, his
name not appearing in the first or main matriculation list, but only in
a supplementary list, and then as “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam,
Dumfriesshire.” His father had by that time given up his trade of
mason, and had left Ecclefechan to try a small farm in the
neighbourhood. The number of students matriculated that year in
the three faculties of Arts, Law, and Medicine, was 1503; and
Carlyle’s matriculation number was 1403. The classes in which he
was enrolled for that session, his fourth and last in Arts, were Leslie’s
2d Mathematical Class (attended a second time, we may suppose, for
such higher instruction as might be fit for very advanced students),
and the Natural Philosophy Class, under Professor John Playfair. In
this last session, accordingly, as a student only of Mathematics and
Physics, with no distraction towards either Classics or Mental
Philosophy, Carlyle may be said to have been in his element. He
worked very hard in both classes, and distinguished himself in both.
My own impression, from talks with him on the subject, is that he
was, by acknowledgment of professors and fellow-students, easily
supreme in both. Leslie’s second class that year numbered but forty-
one students, and it was natural that his most distinguished student
in two previous sessions should now be familiar with him and receive
his especial notice. Certain it is that of all the Professors of
Edinburgh University in Carlyle’s time Leslie was the only one of
whom he spoke always with something of real gratitude and
affection. The affection was mixed, indeed, with a kind of laughing
remembrance of Leslie’s odd, corpulent figure, and odd rough ways;
and he would describe with particular gusto the occasional effects of
Leslie’s persistent habit of using hair-dyes, as when a streak of pink
or green would be observable amid the dark-brown or black on those
less accessible parts of his head where the chemicals had been too
liberally or too rashly applied. But he had a real esteem for Leslie’s
great abilities, and remembered him as a man to whose
mathematical instructions, and to whose private kindness, he owed
much.——A greater Hero with him in Pure Mathematics than even
Leslie, I may mention parenthetically, was the now totally-forgotten
John West, who had been assistant-teacher of Mathematics in the
University of St. Andrews for some time from about 1780 onwards,
and of whom Leslie, Ivory, and all the other ablest mathematicians
sent forth from that University, had been pupils. Of this man, whom
he knew of only by tradition, but whom he regarded as, after Robert
Simson of Glasgow, the most original geometrical genius there had
been in Scotland, I have heard him talk I know not how often. He
would sketch West’s life, from the time of his hard and little-
appreciated labours at St. Andrews to his death in the West Indies,
whither he had emigrated in despair for some chaplaincy or the like;
he would avow his belief that Leslie had derived some of his best
ideas from that poor man; and he expressed pleasure at finding I
knew something of West independently, and had a copy of West’s
rare Elements of Mathematics, published in 1784. That book,
obsolete now, was, I have no doubt, a manual with Carlyle while he
was studying Mathematics in Edinburgh University, as I chance to
know it had been with Dr. Chalmers at St. Andrews in his earlier
mathematical days.——Of Leslie’s colleague, the celebrated Playfair,
formerly in the Mathematical Chair, but since 1805 in that of Natural
Philosophy, Carlyle had a less affectionate recollection personally
than of Leslie. Sharing, I believe, the common opinion of Playfair’s
great merits, and minutely acquainted with the facts of his life, as
indeed he was with the biographies of all persons of any mark with
whom he had come into contact, he rather resented a piece of
injustice which he thought Playfair had done to himself. There were
131 students in the Natural Philosophy Class in 1812–13; and Carlyle,
as he assured me, was single in that whole number for having
performed and given in every one of all the prescribed exercises,
mathematical or other. Another Dumfriesshire student, who came
next to him, had failed in one, and that the most difficult. Naturally,
at the end of the session, he expected that his certificate would
correspond to his distinction in the class; and it was of some
consequence to him that it should. But, when he called at Playfair’s
house for the certificate, and it was delivered to him by a man-
servant, he was a good deal disappointed. The usual form of the
wording for a good student was to the effect that the Professor
certified that so-and-so had attended the class in such and such a
session and had “made good proficiency in his studies.” In Carlyle’s
case there was a certain deviation from this form, but only to the
effect that he had attended the class and that the Professor “had
reason to know that he had made good proficiency in his studies.” I
can remember Carlyle’s laugh as he told me of this delicate
distinction; and I have always treasured the anecdote as a lesson for
professors. They ought to be very careful not only in noting talent on
the benches before them, but also in signifying what they have
noted, if only because, as in Playfair’s case, they may be sometimes
entertaining an angel unawares, and some angels have severe
memories.
We have thus brought Carlyle to the summer of 1813, when he
had completed his Arts course in the University of Edinburgh, and
was in the eighteenth year of his age. Though qualified, according to
the present standard, for the degree of M.A., he did not take it; but in
that he was not in the least singular. In those days hardly any
Edinburgh student ever thought of taking a degree in Arts; as far as
Edinburgh University was concerned, the M.A. degree had fallen into
almost complete disuse; and not till within very recent memory has it