But it was at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm
the road to fame. His wife's sharp tongue, and the gnawings of his
own dyspepsia, were lived down with true Scottish grimness. It was
here that he wrote some of his most penetrating and sympathetic
essays, which were published by the leading reviews of England and
Scotland. Here, too, he began to teach his countrymen the value of
German literature.

The most remarkable of his productions was that strange work
entitled Sartor Resartus (1834), an extraordinary mixture of the
sublime and the grotesque. The book quivers and shakes with tragic
pathos, with inward agonies, with solemn aspirations, and with
riotous humor.

In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to
London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from
fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could
be more readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote
what must seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History
of the French Revolution. For this he had read and thought for
many years; parts of it he had written in essays, and parts of it
he had jotted down in journals. But now it came forth, as some one
has said, "a truth clad in hell-fire," swirling amid clouds and
flames and mist, a most wonderful picture of the accumulated
social and political falsehoods which preceded the revolution, and
which were swept away by a nemesis that was the righteous judgment
of God.

Carlyle never wrote so great a book as this. He had reached his