principles of the new philosophy with some account of the philosopher's life and character. Thus the work took the form of a "Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdroeckh," and as such it was offered to the world. Here, of course, we reach the explanation of its fantastic title--"Sartor Resartus," or the Tailor Patched: the tailor being the great German "Clothes-philosopher," and the patching being done by Carlyle as his English editor. As a piece of literary mystification, Teufelsdroeckh and his treatise enjoyed a measure of the success which nearly twenty years before had been scored by Dietrich Knickerbocker and his "History of New York." The question of the professor's existence was solemnly discussed in at least one important review; Carlyle was gravely taken to task for attempting to mislead the public; a certain interested reader actually wrote to inquire where the original German work was to be obtained. All this seems to us surprising; the more so as we are now able to understand the purposes which Carlyle had in view in devising his dramatic scheme. In the first place, by associating the clothes-philosophy with the personality of its alleged author (himself one of Carlyle's splendidly living pieces of characterisation), and by presenting it as the product and expression of his spiritual experiences, he made the mystical creed intensely human. Stated in the abstract, it would have been a mere blank _-ism_; developed in its intimate relations with Teufelsdroeckh's character and career, it is filled with the hot life-blood of natural thought and feeling. Secondly, by fathering his own philosophy upon a German professor Carlyle indicates his own indebtedness to German idealism, the ultimate source of much of his own teaching. Yet, deep as that indebtedness was, and anxious as he might be to acknowledge it, he was as a humourist keenly alive to certain glaring defects of the great German writers; to their frequent tendency to lose themselves among the mere minutiae of erudition, and thus to confuse the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar characteristics of Teutonic scholarship and speculation; as in the many amusing criticisms which are passed upon Teufelsdroeckh's volume as a sort of "mad banquet wherein all courses have been confounded;" in the burlesque parade of the professor's "omniverous reading" (_e.g._, Book I, Chap. V); and in the whole amazing episode of the "six considerable paper bags," out of the chaotic contents of which the distracted editor in search of "biographic documents" has to make what he can. Nor is this quite all.