Carlyle was the author of many statements meant to salve his own wounds. One of his famous hobbies was to attack people who seek happiness, no doubt because that is the very thing he himself sought his whole life long. He told them to seek blessedness. Let us examine the following passage from one of the most famous chapters of _Sartor Resartus_, entitled "The Everlasting Yea." "I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earliest years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-torturing, on account of? Say it in a word; is it not because thou art not happy?.... Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that _thou_ shouldst be happy?... Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe ... there is in man a Higher than love of Happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness." We can discern under all this Carlyle's despair because he is not happy. Teufelsdröck, who is Carlyle's picture of himself, had a sweetheart who was stolen by a friend. One may be sure that Teufelsdröck would have given up his ideal of blessedness if this misfortune could have been prevented. No doubt, like Carlyle, he had dyspepsia, was poverty-stricken and had a hard path to travel to success. Of course he would have wished to have had a good stomach, to be free from money troubles, and to be recognised. All these fortunate circumstances were not his. He had to say to himself, "Away with them. I am better off without them." But it is certain he never could have really felt this way. We learn from Carlyle's recently published letters, written to his future wife in his courting days, that he was unhappy for personal reasons; because she coquetted with him or jilted him, because he was unsuccessful, because he was poor, etc. He whined only too much though no doubt he had reason therefor. He is full of the Byronism which he affected to despise. It is likely that Browning and Carlyle, who remain, nevertheless, among the greatest English writers, may have thought at the time of writing that they believed what they said. But psychoanalysis teaches us that we do not really know our own minds. We may think we are honest when we really are deceiving ourselves. A writer may seek an effect which is attained by lauding a moral sentiment. Did not Shelley profess to believe in immortality of the soul, in his elegy on Keats, _Adonais_, while we know from a prose essay of his that he did not believe in immortality? We should try to learn the whole truth from the fractional part of it or unconscious lie that authors give us. We will find a personal background for all their theories, a past humiliation or a present need, which will explain the origin of the ideas professed.