wants such, that living wisdom is quite infinitely precious to man, is the symbol of the godlike to him, which even weak eyes may discern; that loyalty, discipleship, all that was ever meant by hero-worship ves perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in these dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, and inspire all men with it, and again make the world alive! James Boswell we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr, to this high everlasting truth. A wonderful martyr, if you will; and in a time which made such martyrdom doubly wonderful: yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited each other. For a decrepit, death-sick era, when CANT had first decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that God-worship and Mammon-worship were one and the same, that life was a lie, and the earth Beelzebub's, which the Supreme Quack should inherit; and so all things were fallen into the yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corruption: for such an era, perhaps no better prophet than a parti-coloured zany-prophet, concealing, from himself and others, his prophetic significance in such unexpected vestures, was deserved, or would have been in place. A precious medicine lay hidden in floods of coarsest, most composite treacle; the world swallowed the treacle, for it suited the world's palate; and now, after half a century, may the medicine also begin to show itself! James Boswell belonged, in his corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind; a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit: but in his corruptible there dwelt an incorruptible, all the more impressive and indubitable for the strange lodging it had taken.

Consider, too, with what force, diligence, and vivacity he has rendered back all this which, in Johnson's neighbourhood, his "open sense" had so eagerly and freely taken in. That loose-flowing, careless-looking work of his is as a picture by one of Nature's own artists; the best possible resemblance of a reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirror. Which indeed it was: let but the mirror be clear, this is the great point; the picture must and will be genuine. How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recognition and vision which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of wisdom, the deeds and aspects of wisdom, and so, little by little, uncon

sciously works together for us a whole Johnsoniad; a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many centuries had been drawn by man of man! Scarcely since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled; ind, in many senses, this also is a kind of heroic poem. The Odyssey of our unheroic age was to be writte not sung; of a thinker, not of a fighter; and (for want of a Homer) by the first open soul that might offer - looked such even through the organs of a Boswell...

The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him; discerning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass; without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret. . . . Nay, sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of him; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities that he did his good work; as if it were the very fact of his being among the worst men in this world that had enabled him to write one of the best books therein! Falser hypothesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul! Bad is by its nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything is by its very nature good. Alas, that there should be teachers in Israel, or even learners, to whom this world-ancient fact is still problematical, or even deniable! Boswell wrote a good book because he had a heart and an eye to discern wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent — above all, of his love and childlike openmindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his book, which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was not sycophancy, which is the lowest, but reverence, which is the highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have found his way from Boswell's environment to Johnson's: if such worship for real God-made superiors showed itself also as worship for apparent tailor-made superiors, even as hollow interested mouth-worship for such, the case, in this composite nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity! But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last article of faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worth

the name: That neither James Boswell's good book, nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof.

As for the book self, questionless the universal favour entertained for it is well merited. worth as a book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century: all Johnson's own writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it; already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this generation; and for some future generation may be valuable chiefly as prolegomena and expository scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of us but remembers, as one of the sunny spots in his existence, the day when he opened these airy volumes, fascinating him by a true natural magic! It was as if the curtains of the past were drawn aside, and we looked mysteriously into a kindred country, where dwelt our fathers; inexpressibly dear to us, but which had seemed forever hidden from our eyes. For the dead night had engulfed it; all was gone, vanished as if it had not been. Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, there once more it lay; all bright, lucid, blooming; a little island of creation amid the circumambient void. There it still lies; like a thing stationary, imperishable, over which changeful time were now accumulating itself in vain, and could not, any longer, harm it or hide it. . . . Consider all that lies in that one word Past! What a pathetic, sacred, in every sense poetic, meaning is implied in it; a meaning growing ever the clearer, the farther we recede in time the more of that same past we have to look through! On which ground indeed must Sauerteig1 have built, and not without plausibility, in that strange thesis of his: "That history, after all, is the true poetry; that reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction; nay that even in the right interpretation of reality and history does genuine poetry consist."

Thus for Boswell's Life of Johnson has time done, is time stili doing, what no ornament of art or artifice could have done for it. Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were, and are not.

1 A fictitious author whom Carlyle had introduced mystifyingly into his essay on Biography, which appeared in the issue of Fraser's preceding this.

Their life and whole personal environment has melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street; but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, pot-bellied landlord; its rosy-faced assiduous landlady, with all her shining brass pans, waxed tables, well-filled lardershelves; her cooks, and bootjacks and errand-boys, and waterymouthed hangers-on? Gone! gone! The becking waiter who, with wreathed smiles, was wont to spread for Samuel and Bozzy their supper of the gods, has long since pocketed his last sixpence, and vanished, sixpences and all, like a ghost at cock-crowing. The bottles they drank out of are all broken, the chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very knives and forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished; in very deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there: of London, of England, of the world, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were they of adamant), only slower. The mysterious river of existence rushes on: a new billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former billow, with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it? — Where! Now this book of Boswell's, this is precisely a revocacation of the edict of Destiny; so that time shall not utterly not so soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A little row of naphtha-lamps, with its line of naphtha-light, burns clear and holy through the dead night of the past: they who are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little miraculously lamplit pathway; shedding its feebler and feebler twilight into the boundless dark oblivion, for all that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us; on which miraculous little pathway we can still travel, and see wonders....

SARTOR RESARTUS

1833-34

[This work, the most fully representative of Carlyle's genius, first appeared in Fraser's Magazine between November, 1833, and August, 1834 It purported to be made up of manuscript fragments written by Dr. Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a Professor in the German University of Weissnichtwo, and of translations from a book of Teufelsdröckh's on Clothes (Die Kleider); this hoax was so well maintained that some reviewers were deceived by it. Carlyle's title means "The Tailor Re-Tailored." Of the style he said: "Teufelsdröckh is not a cultivated writer. Of his sentences, perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or that tag-rag hanging from them; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides." The present selections are from Book 1, chapters 8 and 9; Book 2, chapters 7 and 9; and Book 3, chapter 8.]

THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES

IF in the Descriptive-Historical portion of this Volume, Teufelsdröckh, discussing merely the Werden (Origin and successive Improvement) of Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more will he in the Speculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of their Wirken, or Influences. It is here that the present Editor first feels the pressure of his task; for here properly the higher and new Philosophy of Clothes commences: an untried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos; in venturing upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is it to know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where the footing is firm substance and wil bear us, where it is hollow, or mere cloud, and may engulf u Teufelsdröckh undertakes no less than to expound the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man's earthly interests "are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes." He says in so many words, "Society is founded upon Cloth"; and again, "Society sails through the infinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in the Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, would