health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are
greater than I am able to bear.

Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of
Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no
surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have
proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack
service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a
translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun,
according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822,
and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on
Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum
of L50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that
Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his
practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an
author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has
been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of
swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap."
But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is
nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to
appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in
1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an
encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into
German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an
important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name
conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly
perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak
slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said
he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic."
But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other