76 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. 66 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 RENEWED STUDIES. 79 in his hands, an idle capability of which nothing came. Yet the pause at first seems to have been grateful. He had nothing to do- but at all events he had escaped from long toiling at a trade which was not his. Accordingly, he attended several classes in the College during the winter of 1818-19; among which were Chemistry and Natural History. "He prosecuted these studies," says a fellow-student, "at least in some of their branches, with great delight;" although in a note written at this period to Mr. Gordon, afterwards Dr. Gordon of Edinburgh, he confesses, while mentioning that he had been studying mineralogy, " that he had learned from it as little about the structure of the earth as he could have learned about the blessed Gospel by examining the book of kittle* Chronicles!" He was also much occupied with the modern languages; French and Italian especially. These were before the days of Teutonic enthusiasm; but Irving seems to have had a pleasure in, and faculty for, acquiring languages, as was testified by his rapid acquirement of Spanish at an after period of his life. Some of the few letters which throw any light on this period are occupied with discussions about dictionaries and grammars, and the different prices of the same — which show him deep in the pursuit of Italian, and at the same time acting as general agent and ready undertaker of country commissions. One of these, addressed to one of his pupils in the manse of Kirkcaldy, conveys, after reporting his diligence in respect to sundry of such commissions, the following advice :— - "Let me entreat you to pursue your own improve * Difficult, puzzling. ment sedulously, both religious and intellectual. Read some of the Latin and Italian classics, with a view to the higher accomplishments of taste and sentiment, directing all your studies by the principle of fitting your mind still more and more for perceiving the beauties and excellences God has spread over the existence of man." Such a motive for studies of this description has novelty in it, though it is one that we are well enough accustomed to see applied to all those educational preparations of science with which our schools abound. While he thus occupied himself in completing an education which throughout must have been more a gradual process of improving and furnishing the mind than of systematic study, Irving had also engaged warmly in all the recognised auxiliaries of university training. He had been in the habit for years before of occasionally attending the meetings of one of the literary societies of the College, the Philomathic, and taking a considerable share in its proceedings. "He was sometimes very keen and powerful in debate," says Dr. Grierson," and without being unfair or overbearing, was occasionally in danger, by the vehemence of his manner and the strong language he employed, of being misunderstood and giving offence." But on coming to Edinburgh in 1818, he found this society, now defunct, too juvenile for his maturer age and thoughts; and was instrumental in instituting another of riper pretensions, intended "for the mutual improvement of those who had already completed the ordinary academic course." This was called the Philosophical Association, and consisted only of seven or eight members; of whom |