ate surroundings and after the rudest fashion.
They were a strange and ill-assorted couple--he in manner
and appearance a gaunt and uncouth peasant; she a delicate
and nervous woman of the world. Carlyle suffered tortures
from dyspepsia, which often made him as savage as a wolf.
His wife, who had married him less from love than because
she thought he had a great career before him, suffered from
his heedlessness and roughness, yet took her revenge upon
him by the sharpness of her tongue, and by the burning
record which she left of their mutual bitterness and spite.

It was in this lonely place that Carlyle wrote "Sartor
Resartus," which first appeared in _Fraser's Magazine_
(1833-1834). It is one of the strangest and most eccentric
of literary productions. It has no form. Its language is
often exclamatory, vociferous, and wild--interlarded also
with foreign words, and words that Carlyle himself invented.
It really sets forth the personal opinions, the fanciful
speculations, and the mental writhings of its author; and it
foreshadows the almost demoniac power wherewith Carlyle
afterward wrote the story of the French Revolution, which he
himself called "truth clad in hell-fire."

Carlyle, as a man, was so erratic as to be almost
impossible. His opinions were extreme, and he was fond of
bellowing them forth in the fiercest and most furious words,
insulting those who differed with him, eaten up by a
colossal vanity, and yet unquestionably a genius of the
first order.

Night View of a City.

"Ah, my dear friend," said he once, at midnight, when we had returned from
the coffee-house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to dwell
here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and
thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night,
what thinks Booetes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the zenith
in their leash of sidereal fire?

"That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the
chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant
streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due pitch
for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds,
are abroad; that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick
Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors, and