In Literature we dared challenge the nations. The popularity of Cooper was at its high noon. Irving, with the graphic and delicate strokes of his sympathetic pencil, had written himself the Claude Lorraine among _litterateurs_; and Prescott, with his sentences of granite, was building himself an immortal name. Still, we were behind Germany, and even France, in that wide comprehension and universal criticism that determines more accurately than its politics the real _status_ of a nation. These elements were now to be supplied. Carlyle had played in England the _role_ so humorously yet thoroughly enacted in Germany by Heine, and so gracefully and airily performed in France by Cousin. He had _popularized_ the philosophers. Without the acute, electric perceptions of the great German or the industry and amiable vanities of that De Sevigne among philosophers, Cousin, he presented, by fierce dashes of his crayon, black, blunt, and bluff, to the hitherto ignorant British public, some phases of the great metaphysical bearings of the age upon Literature and Art, as developed in Teutonic poetry and prose. In a word, he familiarized his readers with the _AEsthetik_ of Germany. He published in 1830 his _Sartor Resartus_, which, clothing the man in '_der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid_,' usurped for him at once an office not inferior to that of the _Erd-geist_ in _Faust_. The shrill notes of the bagpipe of the critic of Craigenputtock blew across the mountains and valleys of his island home, rousing the judge on the bench, and, penetrating the long halls of Cambridge and Oxford, streamed yet distinct and powerful to our shores. Astonished by the richness and fullness of a literature so comprehensive, which seemed to inclose in its brilliant mazes all that their meagre and unfruitful dogmas denied of comfort to the heart and systematic development to the mind, the men who, with girded loins and scrips in their hands, had long wandered disconsolately on the shores of a seething ocean, now saw its waters parted, and crossed upon dry ground. Before them stretched the vast wilderness of German Philosophy. To their bewildered gaze, each system was an Arabia Felix, and every axiom a graceful palm.