fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three
weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise,
... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered,
etc.

What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards
stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack?

Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood.
"Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than
it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his
mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a
matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have
seemed as if possessed."

Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully
about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject,
yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean
compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon
gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his
throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes.

I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and
converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But
it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere
denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as
wages for all that bogpool of disgust.

The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in
Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great