intercourse with the higher classes. Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigour, a true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning words, lilce so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendour from Jove's head; a rich, idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy turns; all the graces and terrors of a wild Imagination, wedded to the clearest Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, so often intervene!'
'On the whole,' he continues,—and here the keen and caustic analysis discloses itself even more obviously as self-criticism,—'Professor Teufelsdröckh is not a cultivated writer.'
'Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed-up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few even sprawl-out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered.'
Fascinating however as the hunt for autobiographical touches in Sartor Resartus may be to the reader of to-day, it had of course no interest for the reader of sixty years ago. He was thrown back on the thought, the poetry, the humour, the general drift and purpose of the book, and he had to make what he could of it in that way. In many cases probably the unfortunate man endeavoured to read it 'for the story,' though if the effect of attacking Sir Charles Grandison in that spirit would have been as Johnson held, to drive the student to suicide, the study of Sartor Resartus on the same principle would assuredly seem the path of madness. It may be that a grim sense of the comedy of this mystification led Carlyle to exaggerate his obscurity, perversity, eccentricity, of malice prepense. He had as we know an immense admiration for Sterne, and the notion of applying the method of 'Tristram Shandy' on a cosmic scale so to speak, may well have jumped with his sardonic humour. And that, no doubt, is why to the genuine lovers not merely of the dramatically comic in Sterne's masterpiece (which is his sole attraction for most readers), but of the subjectively fantastic in Sterne himself
