At that time, too, momentous changes were coming upon the industrial and political life of England.  In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened, and in 1832 the Reform Bill was passed.  Men were standing in the backwash of the French Revolution.  The shouts of acclamation with which the promise of that dawn was hailed, had been silenced long ago by the bloody spectacle of Paris and the career of Napoleon Buonaparte.  The day of Byronism was over, and polite England was already settling down to the conventionalities of the Early Victorian period.  The romantic school was passing away, and the new generation was turning from it to seek reality in physical science.  But deep below the conventionality and the utilitarianism alike there remained from the Revolution its legacy of lawlessness, and many were more intent on adventure than on obedience.

It was in the midst of this confused melee of opinions and impulses that Thomas Carlyle strode into the lists with his strange book.  On the one hand it is a Titanic defence of the universe against the stage Titanism of Byron’s Cain.  On the other hand it is a revolt of reality against the empire of proprieties and appearances and shams.  In a generation divided between the red cap of France and the coal-scuttle bonnet of England Carlyle stands bareheaded under the stars.  Along with him stand Benjamin Disraeli, combining a genuine sympathy for the poor with a most grotesque delight in the aristocracy; and John Henry Newman, fierce against the Liberals, and yet the author of “Lead, kindly Light.”

The book was handicapped more heavily by its own style than perhaps any book that ever fought its way from neglect and vituperation to idolatrous popularity.  There is in it an immense amount of gag and patter, much of which is brilliant, but so wayward and fantastic as to give a sense of restlessness and perpetual noise.  The very title is provoking, and not less so is the explanation of it—­the pretended discovery of a German volume upon “Clothes, their origin and influence,” published by Stillschweigen and Co., of Weissnichtwo, and written by Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh.  The puffs from the local newspaper, and the correspondence with Hofrath “Grasshopper,” in no wise lessen the odds against such a work being taken seriously.

Again, as might be expected of a Professor of “Things in General,” the book is discursive to the point of bewilderment.  The whole progeny of “aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial devils” breaks loose upon us just as we are about to begin such a list of human apparel as never yet was published save in the catalogue of a museum collected by a madman.  A dog with a tin kettle at his tail rushes mad and jingling across the street, leaving behind him a new view of the wild tyranny of Ambition.  A great personage loses much sawdust through a rent in his unfortunate nether garments.  Sirius and the Pleiades look down from above.  The book is everywhere, and everywhere at once.  The asides seem to occupy more space than the main thesis, whatever that may be.  Just when you think you have found the meaning of the author at last, another display of these fireworks distracts your attention.  It is not dark enough to see their full splendour, yet they confuse such daylight as you have.