athetic and convivial. Especially I remember
how he relished and applauded the songs of our academic laureate and
matchless chief in such things, Professor Douglas Maclagan, and how,
before we broke up, he expressly complimented Professor Maclagan on
having "contributed so greatly to the hilarity of the evening."'[32]

The most graphic account of Carlyle's installation as Lord Rector is
that by Alexander Smith, the author of 'A Life Drama,' 'Summer in Skye,'
&c., &c., whose lamented death took place a few months after that event.
'Curious stories,' he wrote, 'are told of the eagerness on every side
manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country clergymen from beyond Aberdeen
came to Edinburgh for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen
came down from London by train the night before, and returned to London
by train the night after. Nay, it was even said that an enthusiast,
dwelling in the remote west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who
had charge of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved for
him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edinburgh. Let us hope a
ticket _was_ reserved. On the day of the address, the doors of the Music
Hall were besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived; and
loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd, one could not help
glancing curiously down Pitt Street, towards the "lang toun of
Kirkcaldy," dimly seen beyond the Forth; for on the sands there, in the
early years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed to pace up and
down solitarily, and "as if the sands were his own," people say, who
remember, when they were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired,
swift-gestured, squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy, too, ...
came young Carlyle from Edinburgh College, wildly in love with German
and mathematics; and the schoolroom in which these men taught, although
incorporated in Provost Swan's manufactory, is yet kept sacred and
intact, and but little changed these fifty years--an act of hero-worship
for which the present and other generations may be thankful. It seemed
to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking of that noble
friendship--of the David and Jonathan of so many years agone--was the
best preparation for the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear.
David and Jonathan! Jonathan stumbled and fell on the dark hills, not of
Gilboa, but of Vanity; and David sang his funeral song: "But for him I
had never known what the communi