We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_ from the life of Siebenkaes, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of _Schmelzle's Journey to Flaetz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him, melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have-- What is life? a thawing ice-board On a sea with sunny shore. Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the passage, "Then begun the AEolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common "reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself.