Of the "Reminiscences" which excited so much criticism on account of their references to persons still living, Carlyle wrote on the last page:--"I still mainly mean to _burn_ this book before my own departure, but feel that I shall always have a kind of grudge to do it, and an indolent excuse. 'Not _yet_; wait, any day that can be done!' and that it is possible the thing _may_ be left behind me, legible to interested survivors--_friends_ only, I will hope, and with _worthy_ curiosity, not _un_worthy! In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to _publish_ this bit of writing _as it stands here_, and warn them that _without fit editing_ no _part_ of it should be printed (nor so far as I can order _shall_ ever be), and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps nine-tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become _impossible_."[15] The only editing which Mr Froude deemed "fit" was the omission of this paragraph from his edition of the work. And yet to read, with the "worthy curiosity" of which he speaks, of his love for father and wife, and of his kindly solicitude for brothers and sisters, whom he constantly assisted, is to make him nearer and dearer to those who care to remember that he was after all but human. Carlyle spoke with too little kindness, it must be owned, of Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Lamb, because he saw only the palpable weaknesses of their characters, and was blinded by forbidding externals to the sterling worth of these great men; but he loved Emerson, and Tennyson, and Ruskin, and he profoundly revered Goethe, who, after all, was the only one of his contemporaries who could take rank anywhere near him.[16] Carlyle recognised that Goethe was incomparably his superior in every way; that he was, as Matthew Arnold calls him, "the greatest poet of the present age, and the greatest critic of all ages," the one man of transcendent genius whom Europe has produced since Dante and Shakspere. To have first led England to appreciate Goethe is not the least of Carlyle's many services to his country. To have acted as an inspiring and helpful prophet is perhaps his greatest. "Sartor Resartus" first appeared in _Fraser's Magazine_ for 1833, where it met with but scanty recognition, and, indeed, half-ruined the editor, whose subscribers anxiously asked when the "tailor sketches" were coming to an end. It is surely something more than a passing fashion in literature which leads us now to take up these well-worn pages with so much of tenderness and sympathy. "There is in man," he says, "a Higher than Love of Happiness; he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how, in the Godlike only, has he Strength and Freedom?" How can it be said that