In the latter part of 1865 the students of the University of Edinburgh elected Carlyle Lord Rector of that institution because they considered him the man most worthy to receive such high honor.  In the spring of 1866, he went to Edinburgh to deliver his inaugural address.  Before he returned, he received a telegram stating that his wife had died of heart failure while she was taking a drive in London.  The blow was a crushing one.  The epitaph that he placed on her monument shows his final realization of her worth and of his irreparable loss.  He said truly that the light of his life had gone out.

During his remaining years, he produced little of value except his Reminiscences, a considerable part of which had been written long before.  Honors, however, came to him until the last.  The Prussian Order of Merit was conferred on him in 1874.  The English government offered him the Grand Cross of Bath and a pension, both of which he declined.  On his eightieth birthday, more than a hundred of the most distinguished men of the English-speaking race joined in giving him a gold medallion portrait.  When he died in 1881, an offer of interment in Westminster Abbey was declined and he was laid beside his parents in the graveyard at Ecclefechan.

Sartor Resartus.—­Like Coleridge, Carlyle was a student of German philosophy and literature.  His earliest work was The Life of Friedrich Schiller (1823-1825), which won for him the appreciation and friendship of the German poet, Goethe.

Carlyle’s first great original work, the one in which he best delivers his message to humanity, is Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Patched).  This first appeared serially in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833-1834.  He feigned that he was merely editing a treatise on The Philosophy of Clothes, the work of a German professor, Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh.  This professor is really Carlyle himself; but the disguise gave him an excuse for writing in a strange style and for beginning many of his nouns with capitals, after the German fashion.

When Sartor Resartus first appeared, Mrs. Carlyle remarked that it was “completely understood and appreciated only by women and mad people.”  This work did not for some years receive sufficient attention in England to justify publication in book form.  The case was different in America, where the first edition with a preface by Emerson was published in 1836, two years before the appearance of the English edition.  In the year of Carlyle’s death, a cheap London edition of 30,000 copies was sold in a few weeks.

Carlyle calls Sartor Resartus a “Philosophy of Clothes.”  He uses the term “Clothes” symbolically to signify the outward expression of the spiritual.  He calls Nature “the Living Garment of God.”  He teaches us to regard these vestments only as semblances and to look beyond them to the inner spirit, which is the reality.  The century’s material progress, which was such a cause of pride to Macaulay, was to Carlyle only a semblance, not a sign of real spiritual growth.  He says of the utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely:—­