ement and distraction, it becomes clear enough at last. Clothes,
which at once reveal and hide the man who wears them, are an allegory of
the infinitely varied aspects and appearances of the world, beneath
which lurk ultimate realities. But essential man is a naked animal, not
a clothed one, and truth can only be arrived at by the most drastic
stripping off of unreal appearances that cover it. The Professor will
not linger upon the consideration of the lord's star or the clown's
button, which are all that most men care to see: he will get down to the
essential lord and the essential clown. And this will be more than an
interesting literary occupation to him, or it will not long be that.
Truth and God are one, and the devil is the prince of lies. This
philosophy of clothes, then, is religion and not _belles lettres_. The
reason for our sojourn on earth, and the only ground of any hope for a
further sojourn elsewhere, is that in God's name we do battle with the
devil.

The quest of reality must obviously be wide as the universe, but if we
are to engage in it to any purpose we must definitely begin it
_somewhere_. A treatise on reality may easily be the most unreal of
things--a mere battle in the air. So long as it is a discussion of
theories it has this danger, and the first necessity is to bring the
search down to the region of experience and rigorously insist on its
remaining there. For this end the device of biography is adopted, and we
see the meaning of all that apparent byplay of the six paper bags, and
of the Weissnichtwo allusions which drop as puzzling fragments into Book
I. The second book is wholly biographical. It is in human life and
experience that we must fight our way through delusive appearances to
reality; and Carlyle constructs a typical and immortal biography.

To the childless old people, Andreas and Gretchen Futteral, leading
their sweet orchard life, there comes, in the dusk of evening, a
stranger of reverend aspect--comes, and leaves with them the "invaluable
Loan" of the baby Teufelsdroeckh. Thenceforward, beside the little
Kuhbach stream, we watch the opening out of a human life, from infancy
to boyhood, and from boyhood to manhood. The story has been told a
million times, but never quite in this fashion before. For rough
delicacy, for exquisitely tender sternness, the biography is unique.

From the sleep of mere infancy the child is awakened to the
consciousness of creatorship by the gift of t