long past middle age. It was naturally The French Revolution which dealt the rudest blow at their susceptibilities. Sartor Resartus could be neglected as a mere subjective rhapsody; but the grave or professedly grave history of one of the gravest of modern events was another matter. A work of that description, from the pen of a writer already rising into celebrity compelled the attention of the whole educated public to its contents, and therewith of necessity to its style. And what a style! exclaimed the elder world of literary purists, absolutely aghast. Was it even a 'style' at all? Could you any more discuss it as a style, than you could debate the merits of 'oratory' which did not condescend to begin by being an articulate utterance? If excellence of style (they continued, breathless) consisted partly in the choice of words, and partly in their collocation, what was to be said of a writer who fetched his words from anywhere, and flung them down anyhow upon the page? Was it for this hotch-pot of vocabular monstrosities, this witches' caldron of disjointed sentences, outlandish compounds, fantastic nicknames, extravagant metaphors and obscure allusions, that the world was asked to exchange the gravity, the lucidity, the eloquence of the accepted masters of historical narrative—the simple but nervous English of Hume, the polished periods and majestic cadences of Gibbon ? What would be the fate of our prose literature if the so-called style were to be tolerated and find imitators? And what, O! what would become of the 'dignity of history,' if this was how history was to be written in the future?

Such were the alarmed inquiries and despairing cries which Carlyle's writings drew from the elder generation, and the echo of which was still clearly audible until the majority of that generation had passed away. Well on into the Sixties it was still to be heard, and some of us who were then in our own twenties will remember how many grey-beards were then extant, who, while fully abreast of the time in most of their ideas, nay, often admirers of the genius, and even adherents to the opinions of Carlyle, continued

still to deplore the form of their expression, and sometimes to declare roundly that all their interested and approving study of his works had not even yet reconciled them to his 'jargon.' The young men of the period, or those of them who were growing up into Carlyle's public, were not of course partakers with their seniors in this holy horror, but they could not help being to some extent impressed by it. The fascination which he exercised over them was extraordinary; one despairs of ever making it intelligible to the youth of a generation for whom Carlyle's proportions though imposing are no longer heroic: but there was always a guilty after-feeling about their enthusiasm for him, and they indulged it privily, like a secret vice. Their consciousness of absolute surrender to this 'corrupter of pure English' cost them frequent searchings of heart. Many a time and oft did they ask themselves, whether it might not be the novelty and originality of Carlyle's matter which made them not merely tolerate, but fancy that they delighted in, the 'jargon' in which it was written, and whether, therefore, when the attraction of the matter ceased for them, the 'jargon' might not become detestable? Time has answerered their question for them; and the doubts which disturbed the youth of twenty no longer trouble him who has 'come to fifty year.' The novelty of Carlyle's writings has long since disappeared; all of their supposedly didactic, and much even of their hortatory, influence is extinct; but their charm is imperishable, and the belief once so confidently declared that no prose literature which did not conform to correct and classic models could hope to stand the test of time has thus far derived no confirmation from the case of Carlyle.

We can still see and admit that there was an element of reason in the fears of our parents, and an element of truth in their contention; but we can now also discern the due limits both of the one and of the other. There was ground for the apprehension that the literary example of Carlyle would be mischievous, and, in so far as he has found imitators, it has so proved. But such imitators

have been almost invariably mere mimics of his mannerisms, with no thoughts of their own to express, nor probably any natural manner of their own to spoil by the affectation; and the Carlylian style is too distinctively shaped and coloured by the Carlylian individuality to tempt any writer with an individuality of his own to adopt it. English prose, in short, appears on the whole to be much what it would have been if Carlyle had never lived; he has made not a hundredth part of the impression on it that it received, for instance, from Macaulay. There was justice again in the contention, that that prose style of ours which has been slowly perfecting itself throughout the two centuries that have passed since the day of Dryden, is the best possible mould in which the historian can cast his narrative, or the philosopher his thoughts. Carlyle wherever he has a commonplace tale to tell is himself the witness; he has proved the point over many a long dry tract of his Frederick, where the jerky emphasis of his manner of narrating what could not be narrated too unemphatically, becomes a mere weariness to the flesh. But this contention of his censors overlooks the fact that rules without exceptions are as rare in literature as in life, and that to a genius of exceptional and indeed unique character rules of style must bend. It fails to recognise that-in the literary art at any rate-the claim of symmetry, of formal beauty, though great, is not paramount, but that the adequacy of the medium of expression to the thing to be expresssed, must always be the first consideration. For so manysided and many-coloured a genius as Carlyle's with his throng of commanding faculties-his fiery eloquence, his rugged pathos, his grim and caustic humour, his unrivalled talent for word-portraiture and picturesque description-all struggling, sometimes almost simultaneously, to express themselves, there was but one possible language the Carlylese. And whatever may happen to the 'claim of style,' whatever may become of the 'dignity of history,' we may be sure that so long as eloquence, and pathos, and humour, and vivid portraiture and picturesque description retain their power to

move and delight mankind, Carlyle's place in the admiration of posterity will be secure.

It would be superfluous in this place, I think, to attempt anything like a complete biography of Carlyle, in however condensed a form. The main incidents of his life, and in particular the history of his middle and later years, must be already too familiar to most readers not only from Mr. Froude's pages, but from the flood of studies, sketches, letters, reminiscences, and the like, which has poured forth in such unbroken volume since his death. It will be more to the purpose of an introduction to the first volume of this new edition of his works, to confine myself mainly to such details of the author's life as are to be gathered from those passages of Sartor Resartus, which can with reasonable certainty be identified as autobiographical. In a sense, no doubt, it might be said that this remarkable work-by some admirers regarded as the greatest, and by none denied to be the most characteristic, of all his writings -is autobiographical from first to last. It is unquestionably a minute and faithful history of Carlyle's intellectual and spiritual experiences, which, of course, is the main thing. There can be no doubt, for instance, that Pedagogy (Book II., chap. iii.) records the author's bitter memories of what he deemed his perverse and unintelligent schooling, and barren University course. We know as a fact, that the three great chapters in this same Book II. 'The Everlasting No,' Centre of Indifference,' and 'The Everlasting Yea,' give the history of the shipwreck of his early faith, his fierce struggle in the waters of blank materialism, and his ultimate winning to that bleak, but at least habitable, island of the Stoics whereon he spent the remainder of his days. We know, or believe ourselves to know the exact date and place of these memorable wrestlings; that their crisis occurred in the month of June 1821, in Edinburgh (the so-called 'French Capital' of Book II., chap. vii.) and that the Rue Saint-Thomas d'Enfer, in which the wrestler 'shook base fear away from him for ever,' is no other than Leith Walk in that city.

So too, we can plausibly identify the days of his schoolmastership at Kirkcaldy; and the probable or possible original of 'Blumine,' the heroine of the exquisite chapter entitled 'Romance,' -that solitary meadow, green and sunlit, that breaks the stern mountain scenery of the Third Book-has been it seems discovered in the person of Miss Gordon, an ex-pupil of Edward Irving's. We can trace his earliest introduction to London society, and his discontent with it; we can find a distinct enough adumbration of his mother in Gretchen Futteral, if little or none of his father in Andreas; and, indeed, it is likely enough, I suppose, that an acute and diligent student of Sartor Resartus, with a biography at hand for constant reference, might be able to track Carlyle under the disguise of Herr Von Teufelsdröckh along the highway of life, past all those sixteen year-stones which divide the Edinburgh student days of 1818 from the date of the first startling apparition of Sartor in Fraser's Magazine for November 1833.

But it must of course be borne in mind that any strict parallelism between the author and his creation is not to be expected. With his head full of German literature and thought-the only subject on which for several years past he had been able to obtain a hearing in the London periodical press, it was natural enough that Carlyle should have made an imaginary German Professor the vehicle of his opinions. But to have 'stood' for the portrait in every detail would have defeated his own purpose, since it would have made it impossible for him without the appearance of undue egotism to enlarge as admiringly as, both for didactic and artistic reasons, he required to do on the moral attractions and intellectual powers of the author of the Clothes Philosophy. Nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that, for instance, in the following criticism of the Professor's literary style, he was humorously 'posing' Thomas Carlyle as the model for his portrait of Diogenes von Teufelsdröckh :

'In respect of style our Author manifests the same genial capability, marred too often by the same rudeness, inequality, and apparent want of