eing conservative. He had studied the French
Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy.
He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking
Parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent
its time in "preserving the game." What he wanted was a great individual
ruler; a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth afterward
most fully in _Hero Worship_, 1841, and illustrated in his lives of
representative heroes, such as his _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_,
1845, and his great _History of Frederick the Great,_ 1858-1865.
Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle grew older his
admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was none other than
that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator, whose career of
bloody and crafty crime horrified the civilized world.

The essay on _History_ was a protest against the scientific view of
history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful.
"Wonder," he wrote in _Sartor Resartus_, "is the basis of all worship."
He defined history as "the essence of innumerable biographies." "Mr.
Carlyle," said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only the
individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of
having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out in
his greatest book, _The French Revolution_, 1837, which is a mighty
tragedy enacted by a few leading characters--Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon.
He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as
dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a
Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows
itself, in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective
metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting."

But Carlyle's epoch-making book was _Sartor Resartus_ (The Tailor
Retailored), published in _Fraser's Magazine_ for 1833-1834, and first
reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams,
conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities of
the soul. It purported to be the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a
certain Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, Professor _der Allerlei
Wissenschaft_--of things in general--in the University of Weissnichtwo.
"Society," said Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the
suggestions of Lear's speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the
thing itself: un