In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he declares that, while most of _Sartor Resartus_ is mere symbolical myth, this account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the imaginary Teufelsdröckh in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is a record of what happened literally to himself one day in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. He remembered the incident well, he says in the memorandum, and the very spot in Leith Walk where it occurred. The memorandum itself does not date the incident; but Mr. Froude, from authority in his possession, dates it in June 1821. As that was the month of the first visit to Haddington, and first sight of Jane Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever was the amount of change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his recollection of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an exaggeration to say, as Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of Carlyle’s complete “conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense that he then “achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative, by which the whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place, we have Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his _Reminiscences_ that his complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of finding that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods,” and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the eternal blue of Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years after the present date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam Hill between 26th May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place, it would be a mistake to suppose that the spiritual change which Carlyle intended to describe, whether in his own case or in Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from the “Everlasting No,” through the “Centre of Indifference,” to the “Everlasting Yes,” was a change of intellectual theory in relation to any system of theological doctrine. The parting from the old theology, in the real case as well as in the imaginary one, had been complete; and, though there had been a continued prosecution of the question as to the possibility of a Natural Religion, the form in which that question had been prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of personal duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the universe” which Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith was the spiritualistic one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative hypothesis of a struggle between the Divine and the Diabolic, can hardly be doubted. No constitution such as his could have adopted the other theory, or rested in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have been adopted however passionately and held however tenaciously, what a tumult of mind, what a