Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long
misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the most
savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as
the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints
which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse
of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the
duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all
hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for
his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the
Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort,
he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to
her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles--a promise
to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well
broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he
refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew
Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty
called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by
appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge
of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began
to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright
prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend.
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