I do not think I can make you understand the charm of Sartor.  It is a prose poem and a book you must leave for the years to come.  Sartor Resartus means “The tailor patched again.”  And under the guise of a philosophy of clothes Carlyle teaches that man and everything belonging to him is only the expression of the one great real thing—­God.  “Thus in this one pregnant subject of Clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been.”

The book is full of humor and wisdom, of stray lightenings, and deep growlings.  There are glimpses of “a story” to be caught to.  It is perhaps the most Carlylean book Carlyle ever wrote.  But let it lie yet awhile on your bookshelf unread.

At the end of six years or so Carlyle decided that Craigenputtock was of no use to him.  He wanted to get the ear of the world, to make the world listen to him.  It would not listen to him when he spoke from a far-off wilderness.  So he made the great plunge, and saying good-by to the quiet of barren rock and moorland he came to live in London.  He took a house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea, and this for the rest of his life was his home.  But at first London was hardly less lonely than Craigenputtock.  It seemed impossible to make people want either Carlyle or his books.  “He had created no ‘public’ of his own,” says a friend who wrote his life,* “the public which existed could not understand his writings and would not buy them, nor could he be induced so much as to attempt to please it; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more neglected than he had been in Scotland.”

Froude.

Still in spite of neglect Carlyle worked on, now writing his great French Revolution.  He labored for months at this book, and at length having finished the first volume of it he lent it to a friend to read.  This friend left it lying about, and a servant thinking it waste paper destroyed it.  In great distress he came to tell Carlyle what had happened.  It was a terrible blow, for Carlyle had earned nothing for months, and money was growing scarce.  But he bravely hid his consternation and comforted his friend.  “We must try to hide from him how very serious this business is to us,” were the first words he said to his wife when they were alone together.  Long afterwards when asked how he felt when he heard the news, “Well, I just felt like a man swimming without water,” he replied.*

Life of Tennyson.

So once more he set to work rewriting all that had been lost.  In 1837 the book was published, and from that time Carlyle took his place in the world as a man of genius.  But money was still scarce, so as a means of making some, he gave several courses of lectures.  But he hated it.  “O heaven!” he cries, “I cannot speak.  I can only gasp and write and stutter, a spectacle to gods and fashionables,—­being forced to it by want of money.”  One course of these lectures—­the last—­was on Heroes and Her Worship.  This may be one of the first of Carlyle’s book that you will care to read, and you may now like to hear what he has to say of Samuel Johnson in The Hero as a Man of Letters.