case; for, as we shall see, the rest of the volume is the attempt to reconstruct the universe on the principles he has discovered within his own experience.  The story to which we have been listening is Teufelsdroeckh’s way of discovering reality; now we are to have the statement of it on the wider planes of social and other philosophy.  This we shall briefly review, but the gist of the book is in what we have already found.  To most readers the quotations must have been old and well-remembered friends.  Yet they will pardon the reappearance of them here, for they have been amongst the most powerful of all winged words spoken in England for centuries.  The reason for the popularity of the book is that these biographical chapters are the record of normal and typical human experience.  This, or something like this, will repeat itself so long as human nature lasts; and men, grown discouraged with the mystery and bewilderment of life, will find heart from these chapters to start “once more on their adventure, brave and new.”

This, then, is Teufelsdroeckh’s reconstruction of the world; and the world of each one of us requires some such reconstruction.  For life is full of deceptive outward appearances, from which it is the task of every man to come back in his own way to the realities within.  The shining example of such reconstruction is that of George Fox, who sewed himself a suit of leather and went out to the woods with it—­“Every stitch of his needle pricking into the heart of slavery, and world-worship, and the Mammon god.”  The leather suit is an allegory of the whole.  The appearances of men and things are but the fantastic clothes with which they cover their nakedness.  They take these clothes of theirs to be themselves, and the first duty and only hope of a man is to divest himself of all such coverings, and discover what manner of man he really is.

This process of divesting, however, may yield either of two results.  A man may take, for the reality of himself, either the low view of human nature, in which man is but “a forked straddling animal with bandy legs,” or the high view, in which he is a spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries.  It is the latter view which Thomas Carlyle champions, through this and many other volumes, against the materialistic thought of his time.

The chapter on Dandies is a most extraordinary attack on the keeping up of appearances.  The Dandy is he who not only keeps up appearances but actually worships them.  He is their advocate and special pleader.  His very office and function is to wear clothes.  Here we have the illusion stripped from much that we have taken for reality.  Sectarianism is a prominent example of it, the reading of fashionable novels is another.  In the former two are seen the robes of eternity flung over one very vulgar form of self-worship, and in the latter the robe of fashionable society is flung over another.  The reality of man’s intercourse with Eternity and with his fellow-men has died within these vestures, but the eyes of the public are satisfied, and never guess the corpse within.  Sectarianism and Vanity Fair are but common forms of self-worship, in which every one is keeping up appearances, and is so intent upon that exercise that all thought of reality has vanished.