In 1826 he married, and removed to Craigen-Puttoch, on a farm, where, in isolation and amid the wildness of nature, he studied, and wrote articles for the Edinburgh Review, the Foreign Quarterly, and some of the monthly magazines.  His study of the German, acting upon an innate peculiarity, began to affect his style very sensibly, as is clearly seen in the singular, introverted, parenthetical mode of expression which pervades all his later works.  His earlier writings are in ordinary English, but specimens of Carlylese may be found in his Sartor Resartus, which at first appalled the publishers and repelled the general reader.  Taking man’s clothing as a nominal subject, he plunges into philosophical speculations with which clothes have nothing to do, but which informed the world that an original thinker and a novel and curious writer had appeared.

In 1834 he removed to Chelsea, near London, where he has since resided.  In 1837, he published his French Revolution, in three volumes,—­The Bastile, The Constitution, The Guillotine.  It is a fiery, historical drama rather than a history; full of rhapsodies, startling rhetoric, disconnected pictures.  It has been fitly called “a history in flashes of lightning.”  No one could learn from it the history of that momentous period; but one who has read the history elsewhere, will find great interest in Carlyle’s wild and vivid pictures of its stormy scenes.

In 1839 he wrote, in his dashing style, upon Chartism, and about the same time read a course of lectures upon Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in which he is an admirer of will and impulse, and palliates evil when found in combination with these.

In 1845 he edited The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, and in his extravagant eulogies worships the hero rather than the truth.

FREDERICK II.—­In 1858 appeared the first two volumes of The Life of Frederick the Great, and since that time he has completed the work.  This is doubtless his greatest effort.  It is full of erudition, and contains details not to be found in any other biography of the Prussian monarch; but so singularly has he reasoned and commented upon his facts, that the enlightened reader often draws conclusions different from those which the author has been laboring to establish.  While the history shows that, for genius and success, Frederick deserved to be called the Great, Carlyle cannot make us believe that he was not grasping, selfish, a dissembler, and an immoral man.

The author’s style has its admirers, and is a not unpleasing novelty and variety to lovers of plain English; but it wearies in continuance, and one turns to French or German with relief.  The Essays upon German Literature, Richter, and The Niebelungen Lied are of great value to the young student.  Such tracts as Past and Present, and The Latter-Day Pamphlets,