And after work, obedience the best discipline, so he says in _Past and Present_, for governing, and "our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break." Carlyle asked of every man, action and obedience and to bow to duty; he also required of him sincerity and veracity, the duty of being a real and not a sham, a strenuous warfare against cant.

The historical facts with which he had to deal he grouped under these embracing categories, and in the _French Revolution_, which is as much a treasure-house of his philosophy as a history, there is hardly a page on which they do not appear.
"Quack-ridden," he says, "in that one word lies all misery whatsoever." These bare elemental precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing and bizarre richness.

There is nothing else in English faintly resembling the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his style.

Gifted with an extraordinarily excitable and vivid imagination; seeing things with sudden and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a lightning flash, he contrived to convey to his readers his impressions full charged with the original emotion that produced them, and thus with the highest poetic effect.

There is nothing in all descriptive writing to match the vividness of some of the scenes in the _French Revolution_ or in the narrative part of _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, or more than perhaps in any of his books, because in it he was setting down deep-seated impressions of his boyhood rather than those got from brooding over documents, in _Sartor Resartus_.