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DEBATE ON PLURALITIES.

convenience, and where the narrow pews and deep steep galleries, thrust in between the lofty pillars, are as much out of keeping with those pillars themselves as is the white-washed blank of wall, despoiled of its tombs and altars, under the calm height of the vault above. "The Old Assembly Aisle," says the gentleman already quoted, "afforded but very limited accommodation, and the students' gallery was understood to be occupied by some persons not of their body. At this Irving felt great indignation. He remonstrated with the doorkeeper, but in vain; he demanded entrance for himself and others who were excluded; and when no attention was, or perhaps could be, paid by that official, he put his shoulder to the narrow door, and, applying his Herculean strength to it, fairly wrenched it off its hinges! The crash interrupted the proceedings of the court, and produced both surprise and diversion, but no redress of grievances."

A somewhat unscrupulous mode of entering a church, it must be allowed. Such incidents as these—and they might easily be multiplied-display, in perhaps its least objectionable form, that of downright personal force and resistance, the national characteristic intolerance of circumstances, and determination to subdue all outside obstacles to its will, which shows so strongly in the youthful development of Scotchmen; a quality little recognised, but most influential, and which has largely affected the recent history of the Scotch Church. Nobody can read the life of Chalmers, manful and often splendid as that life is, without a perception of this determined wilfulness, and disinclination to yield to circumstances. If the same tendency is not so

INTOLERANCE OF CIRCUMSTANCES.

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apparent in the Jeffreys, Cockburns, and Tytlers of another class, it is probably because the somewhat higher social sphere of the latter had tempered the sharpness of their nationality. Irving's personal strength and relish for its exercise threw into amusing outward exhibitions of force a quality which, though always picturesque and characteristic, is not always amiable.

As the time of his probation lengthened out, it is probable that Irving, with all his inclinations rising towards the profession which the Church had now solemnly sanctioned his choice of, and pronounced him capable for, became very weary of his schoolmaster life. Another school, in opposition to his, was set up in the town, not apparently from any distaste towards him, but from the advancing desire for liberal education which his own long apprenticeship in Kirkcaldy must have fostered; a school which- singular luck for the little Fife seaport-secured the early services of Thomas Carlyle. Changes too, and attempts at widening out his limited possibilities, appear in his own life. To increase the profits of his post-which however of themselves appear to have been considerable, as such matters go,-Irving made an attempt to receive private pupils, who were to attend his school and live under his own charge. For this purpose, he took up his abode in the Abbotshall schoolhouse, at one extremity of the town of Kirkcaldy, but in another parish, the parish schoolmaster of which was, like himself, a candidate for the Church. The house was the upper flat of the building occupied as a school, and was more commodious than the majority of schoolmasters' houses. A nobler Marina could not be than the broad terrace

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ABBOTTSHALL SCHOOL-HOUSE.

overlooking the Firth, but totally unappropriated to any uses of fashion or visitors, upon which stands the schoolhouse of Abbotshall, beholding from its range of windows a wide landscape, always interesting, and often splendid, the Firth with all its islands, the distant spires and heights of Edinburgh, and the green Lothian coast with its bays and hills. Whether the pupils were slow to come, or the conjoint household did not answer, or Irving himself tired of the experiment, does not appear; but it was soon given up, and does not seem to have had any success. "Ay, Mr. Irving once lived here-he was a great mathematician;" says the present incumbent, complacent among his gooseberry bushes ; spoken in that sunny garden, such words throw back and set aside the years which have made little change on anything but man. One forgets how his sun rose to noon, and at noon disastrously went down, carrying with it a world of hopes; a mist of distance conceals the brilliant interval between this homely house and the Glasgow Cathedral crypt. Here, where once he lived, it is not the great preacher, the prophet and wonder of an age, whose shadow lingers on the kindly soil. He was master of Kirkcaldy Academy in those days. He was "a great mathematician"; the glory of an after career, foreign to the schoolroom, has not rubbed out that impression from the mind of his humble successor on the spot where as yet he had no other fame.

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CHAPTER V.

AFLOAT ON THE WORLD.

IN 1818, when he had been seven years in Kirkcaldy, and had now reached the maturity of his twenty-sixth year, Irving finally left his school and gave up teaching. The position seems to have been growing irksome to him for some time before. It was not his profession; and he was wasting the early summer of his life in work which, however cordially he embraced it, was not the best work for such a man. His assistants too,

on whom as the school increased he had to depend, brought him into other complications; and he was now no longer a youth lingering at the beginning of his career, but a man eager to enter the arena where so many others less worthy were contending for the prize; and not only so, but a man engaged to be married, to whom nature indicated the necessity of fixing himself permanently in life. Moved by the rising excitement of all these thoughts, and apparently not without means of maintaining himself for some time, while he saw what work the world might have for him to do, he finally gave up the Kirkcaldy academy in the summer of 1818, and resolving henceforward to devote himself to his own profession alone, came to Edinburgh, where he took lodgings in Bristo Street, a

locality still frequented by students.

Here he was near the College, and in the centre of all that mental activity from which he had been separated in the drowsy retirement of the country town. He entered largely and gladly into all academical pursuits. He renewed his acquaintance with friends who had been with him in his early college days; or whom he had met in his hurried visits to Edinburgh, while lingering through his tedious "partial" sessions in the Divinity Hall; and seems to have heartily set to work to increase his own attainments, and make himself better qualified for whatever post he might be called to. It is not a brilliant period in the young man's life. He presents himself to us in the aspect of an unsuccessful probationer, a figure never rare in Scotland; a man upon whom no sunshine of patronage shone, and whom just as little had the popular eye found out or fixed upon; whose services were unsolicited either by friendly ministers or vacant congregations a man fully licensed and qualified to preach, whom nobody cared to hear. With the conviction strong in his mind that this was his appointed function in the world, and with a consciousness of having pondered the whole matter much more deeply than is usual with young preachers, there rose before Irving the immovable barrier of unsuccess;- not failure; he had never found means to try his powers sufficiently for failureeven that might have been less hard to bear than the blank of indifference and "unacceptability" which he had now to endure. His services were not required in the world; the profession for which, by the labours of so many years, he had slowly qualified himself, hung

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