Returning to Scotland in 1825 he Established himself at Hoddam Hill, a farm near the Sol way, where he farmed and wrote. On 17 Oct. 1826, Carlyle, after a somewhat prolonged, vacillating and rather stormy wooing, succeeded in marrying Jane Baillie Welsh, a woman in many ways as remarkable as himself and dis tinguished as a descendant of John Knox. The humors and distempers of their married life have become proverbial and are to be found most fully recorded in Froude's biography. Both seem to have been extremely and un intelligently self-willed and so vain as to be wholly lacking in reticence about their domes tic life. For two years they lived at Scotsbrig near Edinburgh, where they had the advan tage of the intelligent society of the capital, and where Carlyle supported himself by writing for the reviews. In the Edinburgh Review, under the editorship of his friend Jeffrey (q.v.), he published, in 1827, his well-known essay on 'Richter' and 'The State of German Literature,' an article which led to the famous correspondence with Goethe. For several years the Edinburgh and other reviews were his only medium of publication. He essayed a novel but failed, and was disappointed in his attempts to secure the chair in moral philos ophy at Saint Andrew and a professorship in London University In May 1828 the Carlyles removed to a lonely farm, Craigenputtoch, overlooking the Solway. Here he wrote his 'Essay on Burns,' one of his most sympathetic pieces of criticism (Edinburgh Review, 1828), several other essays of much importance, as 'Voltaire,' (Novalis) and his (Sartor Resartus,' the book for which he is perhaps most famous. Refused by sev eral publishers, 'Sartor Resartus' first saw light in Fraser's Magazine, between December 1833 and August 1834, where it excited such a storm of protest that no separate English edition appeared till 1838. Meanwhile (1836) it first appeared in book form in America, where it was especially commended by Emerson. This most characteristic book of Carlyle purports to be a review by an English editor of a treatise by a learned German professor, Herr Teuf els driickh, with whose life and opinions it deals. The book is written around the famous Phi losophy of Clothes, designed by Swift (q.v.), and is in the main symbolical of Carlyle's creed at this time — that as clothes express the taste of the wearer, so life in all its forms may be regarded as the vesture of the mind. The idea is not a very original one, but is expressed with such oddity of phrase and image that it appears as profound as forcible. The most feature is the account of the moral and spiritual attire of Teufelsdn5c1di, who is Carlyle himself. It is the querulous, stormy tale of early suffering, lack of sym pathy from fellowmen, disappointment alike to the business of the head and the affairs of the heart, despondency and despair over the great question why man is in the universe, doubt and wavering, and final acceptance of the facts of existence with the hope of solu tion through stern endeavor. The book might be called a prose epic of the inner life, and it is wholly egoistic and anthropocentric.
In 1834 the Carlyles removed to London, where they settled in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and here were their headquarters for the re mainder Of their lives. goon after the change he began his 'French Revolution,' which was completed in 1837 and which gave him much more reputation than he had heretofore en joyed. During the same period he wrote the 'Diamond Necklace) and the articles on 'Mira beau' and 'Sir Walter Scott,' the honorarium from which was of great benefit in his im pecunious state. The success of the history enabled him, in the four following years, to gain audience for four series of lectures, 'German Literature,' the (History of European Literature,' (Revolutions' and the more char acteristic (Heroes and Hero-Worship.' Pub lished in book form in 1841, this series remains to-day one of the most widely read of Carlyle's works and is perhaps the clearest expression of his philosophy of history. 'As I take it,*
he says, 'universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked there." The moral animus of the book is expressed farther on in the same introduc tion: 'We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain which i it is good and pleasant to be near." Again, speaking of the Hero as a man of letters, he tells us the purpose of all his own writing: 'The writer of a book, is he not a preacher, preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places?' The book may conveniently mark an im portant time in Carlyle's life. The pamphlet on 'Chartism) of 1840 had enunciated a doc trine, of a political sort, that 'Might is right," —'one of the few strings,* says Nichol, 'on which, with all the variations of a political Paganini, he played through life.' About this time, in short, his ideas of history, of morals, of politics, of' his own mission, seem to have crystallized. Furthermore, his circumstances had definitively bettered. His name was well known and he was able to refuse a chair of history at Edinburgh University and later an other at Saint Andrews. In 1842 the death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother threw an income of at least £200 in the bands of the Carlyles and relieved them of the fear of penury.
From this time on Carlyle's work falls mainly into two main classes: (1) the lives of great individuals and (2) pamphlets of a quasi political sort, powerful lashings of modern in stitutions. The most important of the latter, 'Past and Present,' written in seven weeks, appeared in 1843. Herein Carlyle commits a common and characteristic fallacy in comparing a charming picture of monastic England with some of the worst things of modern life, to the obvious disadvantage of the latter and, by extension and implication, to modern civiliza tion as a whole. Nevertheless, the book makes a strong appeal to our humanity, and is per haps the best example of Carlyle's many pro tests against modern barbarism. It is said to have been productive elf good in factory legis lation. Meanwhile he was engaged on an im portant work of the first class spoken of,— which, after three years' prepara tion, appeared in 1845. Carlyle, with charac teristic thoroughness, spent a large part of the summers of 1842 and 1843 in visiting the battle fields of the Civil War. It is significant that the 'great man" was now, with Carlyle, not necessarily a man of letters, as in his works previous to the French Revolution,' but a man of political prowess as well, and this tendency to exalt the man of might reached its climax in the 'History of Frederick II.' The years between 'Cromwell) and the beginning of are marked by his notable 'Latter Day Pamphlets' (1849), one of the most de nunciatory of his books, and his 'Life of John Stirling' (1851), a dear friend who had died six years before and who, like Edward King and Arthur Hallam, is chiefly remembered through the work of a greater man. After a trip in the fall of 1851, with the Brownings, to France, where he met the chief literary celeb rities of the time — and passed unfavorable comment on them as on all affairs French—he settled down to the planning of the 'History of Frederick II.' On the preparation of this work and the composition of it he was engaged for the next 13 years. His study was inde fatigable and he made two trips to Germany, in 1852 and 1858, to study the battlefields of Frederick. In 1850 the first two volumes were published with great success, the third in 1862, the fourth in 1864 and the fifth and sigh in 1865. During the composition he had done practically no side work; a somewhat un intelligent dialogue, 'Bias Americana in Knee,' on the American War, and his 'Prinzenraub' are the only pieces.