under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social policy; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us.”

In those serene Craigenputtoch days when "Sartor Resartus was meditated and mainly written (for there are in the book, toward its close, passages which clearly belong to a later and far less healthful period), Carlyle's philosophy of life was upon the whole optimist. But in the sentence last quoted we have a glimpse of the pessimist view of humanity, which was in time to become predominant with him. Here follows a passage of grim humor, Teufelsdröckh being the speaker:

THE TAILORS AND THE TAILORED.

"Strange enough, it strikes me, is this fact of there being Tailors and Tailored. The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened around him, and the noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner: nay, his own boot-maker, jeweler, and man-milliner; he bounds through the valleys, with a perennial rainproof suit on his body; wherein warmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of color, featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting. While I,-good Heaven! have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk about a mov

ing Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed off into the Ashpit, into the Laystall, till by degrees the whole has been been brushed thither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rag-grinder, get new material to grind down. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have I not too a compact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am not I a botched mass of tailors' and cobblers' shreds then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?

Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to the plainest facts. But, indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and a dullard, much readier to feed and digest, than to think and consider. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he goldmantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one and indivisible; that he is naked, without vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew and button them. For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch; and how, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizes and demoralizes us, fill me with a certain horror at myself and mankind; almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season, you see grazing deliberately with jackets and petticoats (of striped sacking) in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless, there is something great in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages; and sees

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indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, 'a forked straddling Animal with bandy legs'; yet also a Spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries."

Upon which passage, Mr. Carlyle, speaking in his own name, and as commentator upon the utterances of the Weissnichtwo Professor, says: "Let no courteous reader take exceptions at the opinions here broached. The Editor himself, on first glancing over that singular passage, was inclined to exclaim: 'What, have we got not only a Sansculottist, but an enemy to Clothes in the abstract? A new Adamite in this century, which flatters itself that it is the Nineteenth, and destructive both to Superstition and Enthusiasm ?' 'Or,' cries the courteous reader, 'has your Teufelsdröckh forgotten what he lately said about "Aboriginal Savages," and their "condition miserable indeed"? Would he have all this unsaid; and us betake ourselves to the "matted cloak," and go sheeted in a "thick natural fell"?'-Nowise, courteous reader! The Professor knows full well what he is saying, and both thou and we, in our haste, do him wrong. If Clothes, in these times, so tailorize and demoralize us,' have they no redeeming value? Can they not be altered to serve better? Must they of necesssity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is Teufelsdröckh, though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite ; and much, perhaps, as he might wish to go forth before this degenerate age as a Sign,' would no

wise wish to do it, as those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of Clothes is altogether apparent to him : nay, perhaps he has an insight into their more recondite and almost mystic qualities,-what we might call the Omnipotent virtue of Clothes, such as was never before vouchsafed to any man. For example":

SOCIETY IN ITS STATE CLOTHES.

"You see two individuals, one dressed in fine Red, the other in coarse, threadbare Blue: Red says to Blue, 'Be hanged and anatomized'! Blue hears with a shudder and (O wonder of wonders!) marches sorrowfully to the gallows; is there noosed up, vibrates his hour, and the surgeons dissect him, and fit his bones into a skeleton for medical purposes. How is this? or what make ye of your 'Nothing can act but where it is'? Red has no physical hold of Blue, no clutch upon him, is nowise in contact with him: neither are those ministering Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants and Hangmen and Tipstaves so related to commanding Red that he can tug them hither and thither; but each stands distinct in his own skin. Nevertheless, as it is spoken, so it is done: the articulated Word sets all hands in Action and Rope and Improved Drop perform their work.

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"Thinking reader, the reason seems to me twofold: First, That Man is a Spirit, and bound by invisible bonds to All Men; Secondly, that he wears Clothes, which are visible emblems of that fact. Has not your Red hanging-individual a horsehair wig, squirrel-skins, and a plush gown; whereby, all mortals know that he is a

Judge?-Society, which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth."

The professor then goes off into this grim imaginary picture :

SOCIETY OUT OF CLOTHES.

"Often in my atrabiliar moods, when I read of pompous Ceremonials, Frankfort Coronations, Royal Drawing-rooms, Levées, Couchées; and how ushers and macers and pursuivants are all in waiting; how Duke this is presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B, and innumerable Bishops, Admirals, and miscellaneous Functionaries, are advancing gallantly to the Anointed Presence; and I strive, in my remote privacy, to form a clear picture of that Solemnity,—on a sudden, as by some enchanter's wand, the-shall I speak it?— the clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps; the Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep.

"What would Majesty do, could such an accident befall in reality, should all the buttons simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very Deed, as here in dreams? Ach Gott! How each skulks into the nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (Haupt- und Staats-Action) becomes a Pickle-herring Farce to weep at, which is the worst kind of Farce; the tables (according to Horace), and with them the whole fabric of Govment, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilized Society, are dissolved, in wails and howls."

"Lives there the man," adds Carlyle, now speaking