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CARLYLE 797 gether we talked and wrought and thought ; to- gether we strove, by virtue of birch and book, to initiate the urchins into what is called the rudiments of learning ; until at length the hand of the Lord was laid upon him, and the voice of his God spake to him saying, Arise and get thee hence; and he arose and girded up his loins. And I tarried awhile at Kirkcaldy, en- deavoring still to initiate the urchins into the rudiments of learning. I had been destined by my father and my father's minister to be myself a minister of the kirk of Scotland. But now that I had gained man's estate, I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's kirk ; and it was needful that I should now settle it. And so I entered my chamber and closed the door, and around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms dire from the abysmal depth of nethermost perdition. Doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing were there ; and I wrestled with them in agony of spirit. Thus it was for weeks. Whether I ate I know not; whether I drank I know not; whether I slept I know not. But I know that when I came forth again it was with the dire- ful persuasion that I was the miserable owner of a diabolical arrangement called a stomach." Thus, in his 23d year, he contracted that chronic dyspepsia which has tormented him through life, and given tone to most of his writings. He was at this time in Edinburgh, where he had begun the study of divinity. Hav- ing decided that he could not become a min- ister, he cast about to settle upon his way of life. Leaving Edinburgh, he was for a while tutor in a private family, and made himself mas- ter of the German language and literature. Then returning to Edinburgh, he entered upon his chosen profession, that of "a writer of books." He translated Legendre's geometry, to which he prefixed an "Essay on Proportion," and wrote the "Life of Schiller," which was originally published in the " London Magazine," 1823-'4. About the same time he translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meiiter. In 1826 he mar- ried Jane Welch, a lineal descendant of John Knox, who died in 1866. She appears to have brought him some property, and he went to reside upon her small estate of Oraigenputtoch, among the granite hills and black morasses of the wildest part of Dumfriesshire, 15 miles from a town. During his six years' residence here he studied, thought, and wrote with un- tiring activity. He completed the " Specimens of German Romance" (3 vols., 1827), compri- sing translations from Jean Paul, Tieck, Musaus, and Hoffmann, names then almost unknown in Great Britain ; wrote many biographical sketches for the " Edinburgh Cyclopaedia; " and began the series of essays now known as his " Miscellanies." The first of these, on Jean Paul Richter, appeared in the " Edinburgh Re- view " for 1827, followed within the next two years by several of the best of them all, nota- bly those on Burns and Novalis. These criti- cal and biographical essays, forty in number, were collected in 1845 by Ralph Waldo Emer- son, and republished in America, and among them are fully a score that rank as the best in the language. " Sartor Resartus " was written in 1831, and the next year Oarlyle went with it to London, and upon his arrival there took up his residence in a modest house in Chelsea, in which he has lived ever since. At first he met ill success with his manuscript. The " read- er " for one publisher said that the work was beyond doubt that of a man of talent, but that it was disjointed and fragmentary ; the humor was very German and very heavy ; was not the book, in fact, a translation from the Ger- man ? The publisher declined the book with thanks, but intimated that the author might do better some day. Failing to find a publisher in book form, Sartor Hesartus, "The Stitch- er Restitched," appeared in "Fraser's Maga- zine " in 1833-'4. From all that appears, it does not seem that there was in all England a single reader who found it other than a very absurd and altogether stupid production. The work purports to be extracts from a book on the "Philosophy of Clothes" by Godborn Devilsdung {Diogenes TeufelsdroclcK), born at Duckpuddle (Entepfuhl), and professor of mat- ters and things in general at the university of Don'tknowwhere (Weissnichtwo), with no- tices of the life and opinions of the author. The scope of it is, that all forms, creeds, and institutions are hut the garments in which man has from time to time clothed himself, and that for the most part these garments are sadly out of repair. It is a critique upon the civilization of the age. Intermingled with much that is simply grotesque either in thought or expres- sion, there are passages which, for lofty elo- quence, keen insight, and trenchant satire, are not surpassed by anything in the language. Hitherto the style of Carlyle, though nervous and idiomatic, had been pure and graceful. In "Sartor Resartus" he adopted here and there, and not unfrequently, that involved, intertwisted, and contorted manner which thenceforth became the most obvious charac- teristic of most of his writings. In 1837 was published " The French Revolution, a History," the first of Carlyle's works to which his name was formally attached. It is less a history than a series of tableaux from the history of the revolution, presupposing the reader to be ac- quainted with the general course of the events. The remarkable essay on "Characteristics," written in 1831, marks the time when Carlyle had begun to embrace that doctrine of pessi- mism, which finally became the leading prin- ciple in his philosophy. Taking his own con- firmed dyspepsia as a sort of starting point, he educes the axiom that unconsciousness is not only the sign but the condition of health in the individual and in society. It is the sick, not the well, who are consciously aware of their state. The present age is a self-conscious and therefore a diseased one. " All this talk about the improvement of the age, the spirit of the