ory 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 {287} 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:
unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as
thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a
paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was established who held
the universe to be a large suit of clothes. . . . If certain ermines
or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so
an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In
_Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth,
amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination,