eem to reign in this world in spite of their falsity and shallowness.
It is not, I grant, easy to read. It is full of conceits and
affectations of style,--a puzzle to some, a rebuke to others. "Every
page of this unique collection of confessions and meditations, of
passionate invective and solemn reflection," is stamped with the seal of
genius, and yet was the last of Carlyle's writings to be appreciated. I
believe that this is the ordinary fate of truly original works, those
that are destined to live the longest, especially if they burn no
incense to the idols of prevailing worship, and be characterized by a
style which, to say the least, is extraordinary. Flashy, brilliant,
witty, yet superficial pictures of external life which everybody has
seen and knows, are the soonest to find admirers; but a revelation of
what is not seen, this is the work of seers and prophets whose ordinary
destiny has been anything other than to wear soft raiment and sit in
king's palaces. The "Sartor" was at last, in 1833-1834, printed in
Fraser's Magazine, meeting no appreciation in England, but very
enthusiastically received by Emerson, Channing, Ripley, and a group of
advanced thinkers in New England, through whose efforts it was published
here in book form. And so, in spite of timid London publishers, it
drifted back to London and a slow-growing fame. In our time, sixty years
later, it sells by scores of thousands annually, in cheap and in
luxurious editions, throughout the English-speaking world.

In respect of early recognition and popularity, Carlyle differs from his
great contemporary Macaulay, who was so immediately and so magnificently
rewarded, and yet received no more than his due as the finest prose
writer of his day. Macaulay's Essays are generally word-pictures of
remarkable men and remarkable events, but of men of action rather than
of quiet meditation. His heroes are such men as Clive and Hastings and
Pitt, not such men as Pascal or Augustine or Leibnitz or Goethe. But
Carlyle in his heroes paints the struggling soul in its deepest
aspirations, and the truths evolved by profound meditations. These are
not such as gain instant popular acceptance; yet they are the
longer-lived.

The time came at last for Carlyle to leave his retirement among moors
and hills, and in 1831 he directed his steps to London, spending the
winter with his wife in the great centre of English life and thought,
and being well received; so that in 1834 he