the author of
"Douglas," also became an intimate friend. He now decided to choose a
profession, and had wellnigh concluded an agreement with two surgeons
to study theirs, when he became disgusted with the meanness of the
doctors, who had bought for dissection the body of a child of a poor
tailor for six shillings, the price asked being six shillings and
sixpence, from which they made the needy man abate the sixpence. Turning
from the niggardly surgeons, he enrolled his name as a student of
divinity, and was frequently in Edinburgh attending the lectures at
Divinity Hall. Wonderfully cheap was the living in those days, when,
at the Edinburgh ordinaries, a good dinner could be had for fourpence,
small beer included. John Witherspoon, years after a member of the
American Congress, then a frank, generous young fellow, was a companion
of Carlyle at this period, and they often went fishing together in the
streams near Gifford Hall.

The city of Glasgow, whither young Carlyle had gone to pursue his
studies, was at this time far inferior in point of commerce to what it
afterwards became. The tobacco-trade with the American colonies and the
traffic in sugar and rum with the West Indies were the chief branches of
business. Carlyle did not find the merchants of those days interesting
or learned people, though they held a weekly club, where they discussed
the nature and principle of trade, and invited Alexander to join it. But
he found life in Glasgow very dull, and was constantly complaining that
there was neither a teacher of French nor of music in the town. There
was but one concert during the two winters he spent there. Post-chaises
and hackney-coaches were unknown, their places being supplied by three
or four old sedan-chairs, which did a brisk business in carrying
midwives about in the night, and old ladies to church and the
dancing-assemblies. The principal merchants began their business early
in the morning, and took dinner about noon with their families at home.
Afterwards they resorted to the coffee-house, to read the newspapers
and enjoy a bowl of punch. Until an arch fellow from Dublin came to be
master of the chief coffee-house, nine o'clock was the hour for these
worthy mercantile gentlemen to be at home in the evening. The seductive
Irish stranger began his wiles by placing a few nice cold relishing
things on the table, and so gradually led the way to hot suppers and
midnight symposia. Towards the end of his college