torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed
like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness,
due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men,
machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first
to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical
teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but
journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he
had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been
due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self-
reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any
plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any
"orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical
reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of
neutral gray.

[Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ as "of all books the
most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind.
His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were
often admirably potent and illustrative to me."]

Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow,
which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in
the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of
letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the
Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There
is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the
poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness
to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was
entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart,
misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat,