Inside the body of his work the student of nineteenth century literature is probably in need of some guidance; outside so far as prose is concerned he can fend for himself.
As we saw, Carlyle was the oldest of the Victorians; he was over forty when the Queen came to the throne.

Already his years of preparation in Scotland, town and country, were over, and he had settled in that famous little house in Chelsea which for nearly half a century to come was to be one of the central hearths of literary London.

More than that, he had already fully formed his mode of thought and his peculiar style.

_Sartor Resartus_ was written and published serially before the Queen came to the throne; the _French Revolution_ came in the year of her accession at the very time that Carlyle's lectures were making him a fashionable sensation; most of his miscellaneous essays had already appeared in the reviews.

But with the strict Victorian era, as if to justify the usually arbitrary division of literary history by dynastic periods, there came a new spirit into his work.