Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and August 1830, _Teufelsdroeckh_ was ready, and I decided to make for London; night before going, how I remember it.... The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least of all here! In short, finding that I had got L100 (if memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before, and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not only not get L200, but even get no Murray or the like to publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for some two years from one terrified owl to another; published at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what was sent by Emerson from America. This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense," pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of _Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of _Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley, after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss. It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the _Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had