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CHAPTER II

HIS COLLEGE LIFE.

Prolonged Probation of Scotch Ministers.-Boy-Students.-Independence.-Hard Training.-Journeys on Foot. —Early Reading.-Distinctions in Society.-Patrons and Associates. —Carlyle's Description of Irving. —Early Labors. AT thirteen Irving began his studies at the Edinburgh University: such was, and is still, to a great extent, the custom of Scotch Universities-a habit which, like every other educational habit in Scotland, promotes the diffusion of a little learning, and all the practical uses of knowledge, but makes the profounder depths of scholarship almost impossible. It was nearly universal in those clays, and no doubt partly originated in the very long course of study demanded by the Church (always so influential in Scotland, and acting upon the habits even of those who are not devoted to her service) from applicants for the ministry. This lengthened process of education can not be better described than in the words used by Irving himself at a much later period of his life, and used with natural pride, as setting forth what his beloved Church required of her neophytes. "In respect to the ministers," he says, " this is required of them —that they should have studied for four years in a University all the branches of a classical and philosophical education, and either taken the rank in literature of a Master of Arts, or come out from the University with certificates of their proficiency in the classics, in mathematics, in logic, and in natural and moral philosophy. They are then, and not till then, permitted to enter upon the study of theology, of which the professors are ordained ministers of the Church, chosen to their office. Under separate professors, they study theology, Hebrew, and ecclesiastical history for four years, attending from four to six months in each year. Thus eight years are consumed in study." This is, perhaps, the only excuse which can be made for sending boys, still little more than children, into what ought to be the higher labors of a University. Even beginning at such an age, the full course of study exacted from a youth in training for the Church could not be completed till he had reached his twenty-first year, when all the repeated "trials" of the Presbytery had still to follow before he could enter upon his vocation; an apparent and comprehensible reason, if not excuse, for a custom which, according to the bitter complaints of its victims, turns the University into a kind of superior grammar-school. At thirteen, accordingly, Edward, accompanied by his elder brother John, who was destined for the medical profession, came to Edinburgh, under the charge of some relatives of their Annan schoolfellow, Hugh Clapperton; and the two lads were deposited in a lofty chamber in the old town, near the college, to pursue their studies with such diligence as was in them. Even to such youthful sons the Edinburgh University has no personal shelter to offer: then, as now, the Alma Mater was a mere abstract mass of class-rooms, museums, and libraries, and the youths or boys who sought instruction there were left in absolute freedom to their own devices. Perhaps the youths thus launched upon the world were too young to take much harm; or perhaps that early necessity of self-regulation, imposed under different and harder circumstances than those which have brought the English public schools into such fresh repute and popularity, bore all the fruit which it is now hoped and believed to produce. But, whatever may be the virtues of self-government, it is impossible to contemplate without a singular interest and amaze the spectacle of these two boys, one thirteen, the other probably about fifteen, placed alone in their little lodging in the picturesque but noisy old town of Edinburgh, for six long months at a stretch, to manage themselves and their education, without tutors, without home care, without any stimulus but that to be received in the emulation of the class-room, or from their books and their own ambition. These circumstances, however, were by no means remarkable or out of the common course of thigns; and the surprise with which we look back to so strange a picture of boyish life would not have been shared by the contemporary spectators who saw the south-country boys coming and going to college without perceiving any thing out of the way in it. The manner in which the little establishment was kept up is wonderfully primitive to hear of at so short a distance from our sophisticated times. Now and then the lads received a box from home, sent by the carrier or by some " private opportunity," full of oatmeal, cheese, and other homely necessities, and doubtless not without lighter embellishments, to prove the mother's care for her boys. Probably their linen was conveyed back and forward to the home-laundry by the same means; so that the money expense of the tiny establishment, with its porridge thus provided, and its home relishes of ham and cheese, making the schoolboy board festive, must have been of the most limited amount. Altogether it is a quaint little picture of the patriarchal life, now departed forever. No private opportunities nowadays carry such boxes; and those very railways, which make the merest village next neighbor to all the world, have made an end of those direct primitive communications from the family table to its absent members. Nor is it easy to believe that boys of thirteen, living in lonely independence in Edinburgh, where the very streets are seducing and full of fascinations, and where every gleam of sunshine on the hills, and flash of reflection from the visible firth, must draw youthful thoughts away from the steep gradus of a learning not hitherto found particularly attractive, could live within those strait and narrow limits, and bear such a probation. But times were harder and simpler in the first twenty years of the century. Scotland was a hundred times more Scotch, more individual, more separate from its wealthier yoke-fellow than now. No greater contrast to the life of undergraduates in an ancient English University could be imagined than that presented by those boy-students in their lofty chamber, detached from all collegiate associations, living in the midst of a working-day population, utterly unimpressed by the neighborhood of a University, and interpolating the homely youthful idyll of their existence into the noisy, bustling, scolding, not over-savory life of that old town of Edinburgh. Even such a vestige of academical dress as is to be found in the quaint red gown of Glasgow is unknown to the rigid Protestantism of the Scotch metropolis. The boys came and went, undistinguished, in their country caps and jackets, through streets which, full of character as they are, suggest nothing so little as the presence of a college, and returned to their studies in their little room, with neither tutor nor assistant to help them through their difficulties, and lived a life of unconscious austerity, in which they themselves did not perceive either the poverty or the hardship; which, indeed, it is probable they themselves, and all belonging to them, would have been equally amazed and indignant to have heard either hardship or poverty attributed to. Crowds of other lads, from all parts of Scotland, lived a similar, life; the homely fare and'spare accommodation, the unassisted studies; and in most cases, as soon as that was practicable, personal exertions as teachers or otherwise, to help in the expense of their own education, looked almost a natural and inevitable beginning to the life they were to lead. By such methods of instruction few men are trained to pursue and love learning for learning's sake; but only by such a Spartan method of training the young soldiers of the future could the Annan tanner, with eight children to provide for, have given all his sons an education qualifying them for professional life and future advancement. The Edinburgh " Session" lasts only from November till May, leaving the whole summer free for the recreation, or, more probably, the labors of the self-supporting students. Indeed, the whole system seems based upon the necessity of allowing time for the intervening work which is to provide means for the studies that follow. When the happy time of release arrived, our Annan boys sent off their boxes with the carrier, and, all joyful and vigorous, set out walking' upon the homeward road. In after years Irving delighted in pedestrian journeys; and it was most probably in those early walks that he learned, what was his habitual practice afterward, to rest in the wayside cottages, and share the potato or the porridge to be found there. The habit of universal friendliness thus engendered did him good service afterward; for a man accustomed to such kindly relations with the poorest of his neighbors does not need any other training to that frank uncondescending courtesy which is so dear to the poor. "Edward walked as the crow flies," says one of his surviving relatives who has accompanied those walks when time was. Such an eccentric, joyful, straightforward progress must have been specially refreshing to the schoolboy students, hastening to all the delights of home and country freedom. Whether Irving's progress during this period was beyond that of his contemporaries there is no evidence; but he succeeded sufficiently well to take his degree in April, 1809, when he was just seventeen, and to attract the friendly regard of Professor Christison, and of the distinguished and eccentric Sir John Leslie, then Mathematical Professor in the Edinburgh University, both of whom interested themselves in his behalf as soon as he began his own independent career. So far as the library records go, he does not seem to have been an extraordinary diligent student. There is a story told, which I have not been able to trace to any authentic source, of his having found in a farm-house in the neighborhood of Annan a copy of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, which is said to have powerfully attracted him, and given an impulse to his thoughts. He is also said to have expended almost the whole sum which he had received for the expenses of a journey in the purchase of Hooker's works, "together with some odd folios of the fathers, Homer, and Newton," and to have trudged forward afoot with the additional load upon his stalwart shoulders, in great delight with his acquisition. There can be no doubt, at least, of his own reference to " the venerable companion of my early days -Richard. Hooker." In opposition to this serious reading stand the Arabian Nights, and sundry books with forgotten but suspicious titles, which appear against his name in those early times in the college library books-most natural and laudable reading for a boy, but curiously inappropriate as drawn from the library of his college. " He used to carry continually in his waistcoat pocket," says one of his few surviving college companions, the Rev. Dr. Grierson, of Errol, "a miniature copy of Ossian, passages from which he read or recited in his walks in the country, or delivered with sonorous elocution and vehement gesticulationi" for the benefit of his companions. This is the first indication I can find of his oratorical gifts, and that natural magniloquence of style which belonged equally to his mind and person. I Society in Edinburgh was at this period in its culmination. Those were the "Edinburgh Review" days, when the,,brilliant groups whose reputation is more entirely identified with Edinburgh than that of generations still more exclusively her own, were in full possession of the field. Looking back, the town seems so occupied and filled by that brotherhood, that it is hard to imagine the strains of life all unconscious of its existence, and scarcely influenced, even unconsciously, by its vicinity, which went serenely on within the same limited boundaries; and it is still harder to fancy a youth of genius pursuing his youthful way into the secrets of literature in Edinburgh without the slightest link of connection with the brilliant lettered society which gave tone and character to the place. But the Antipodes are not farther off from us than were the lights of Edinburgh society from the rustic student laboring through his classes. As distinct as if they had belonged to different countries or different centuries were the young lawyers, not much richer, but standing on the threshold of public life, with all its possibilities, and the young clerical students, looking, as the highest hope of their ambition, to the pulpit of a parish church, with a stipend attached of two or three hundred a year at the utmost. In actual means the one might not be much in advance of the other, but in hopes, prospects, and surroundings, how widely different! Beneath that firmament, flashing with light and splendor, the common day went on unconscious, concealing its other half-dawned lights. Among all the fellow-students of Edward Irving, there are no names which have attained more local celebrity except that of Thomas Carlyle, whose fame has overtopped and outlasted that of his early friend; and Carlyle did not share the studies of the four first years of his college life. He stands alone among men who subsided into parishes, and chaplaincies, and educational chairs, but who were his equals, or more than his equals, in those days-without any connection with, or means of approach to, that splendid circle which, one would imagine, concentrated within so limited a sphere as that of Edinburgh, must have found out by magnetic attraction every light of genius within its bounds. But the ecclesiastical flats in which the youth stood, together with his humble origin, more than counteracted that magnetism. If the Church every where never fails to be reminded that her kingdom is not of this world, that reminder is specially thrust upon her in Scotland, where it is a principle of the creed of both ministers and people to believe that even the payment in kind of applause and honor, which is gained in every other profession, is a: sinful indulgence to a preacher, and where demands are made upon his time and patience far too engrossing to admit the claims of society. Irving went on in his early career far down in the shade of common life, out of reach of those lights which, to the next generation, illuminate the entire sphere, and grew from a boy to a young man, and took his boyish share in the college debating societies, and made his way among other nameless youths with no great mark of difference, so far as it appears. Dr. Christison, the Humanity professor, noted him with a friendly eye; and odd, clumsy, kindly Leslie observed the fervor of the tall lad, and took him for a future prop of science. A younger fellow-student records simply how Irving, being more advanced than he, helped him on with his studies, according to that instinct of his nature which never forsook him. And he read Ossian, and argued in defunct Philomathic societies, where he and other people fancied he met equal opponents, till it became necessary for him, seventeen years old and a graduate of Edinburgh University, to begin to help himself onward during the tedious intervals of his professional training. He did this, as all Scotch clerical students do, by teaching. A new school, called the Mathematical School by some strange caprice-since it seems to have been exactly like other schoolshad just been established in Haddington, and by the recommendation of Sir John Leslie and of Professor Christison, Irving got the appointment. It was in the spring of 1810, after one session, as it is called, in the " Divinity Hall," and at the age of eighteen, that he entered upon this situation. To somewhere about the same period must belong the description given of him in Carlyle's wonderful "EEloge." "The first time I saw Irving was in his native town of Annan. He was fresh from Edinburgh, with college prizes, high character and promise: he had come to see our schoolmaster, who had also been his. We heard of famed professors, of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole wonderland of knowledge; nothing but joy, health, hopefulness without end looked out from the blooming young man." Another spectator of more prosaic vision declares him to have been "rather a showy young man," a tendency always held in abhorrence by the sober Scotch imagination, which above all things admires the gift of reticence; or even, in default of better, that pride which takes the place of modesty. Irving, utterly ingenuous and open, always seeking love, and the approbation of love, and doubting no man, did not possess this quality. " The blooming young man" went back to the school in which he was,once kept in and punished with candid, joyful self-demonstration, captivating the eyes which could see, and amusing those which had not that faculty. It was his farewell to his boyish, happy, dependent life. And it was also the conclusion of his University education, so far as reality went. For four or five years thereafter he was what is called a partial student of divinity, matriculating regularly, and making his appearance at college to go through the necessary examinations, and deliver the prescribed discourses, but carrying on his intermediate studies by himself, according to a license permitted by the' Church. His Haddington appointment removed him definitely from home and its homely provisions, and gave him an early outset for himself into the business and labors of independent life. So far from being a hardship, or matter to be lamented, it was the best thing his friends could have wished for him.  

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