of the future that circulated so widely in the Age of Reason and its aftermath.

Criticism of progress drew on a variety of sources, but the most fruitful of all was the tradition of Christian prophecy, as reformulated by Calvin and his followers and, in the nineteenth century, by moral philosophers and social critics—notably Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson— in whom Calvinism remained a powerful background presence. No longer Calvinists or even Christians in any formal sense, Emerson and Carlyle nevertheless reasserted a prophetic understanding of history and human nature in opposition not only to the reigning celebration of progress but to the Burkean alternative. The contrast between Burke's veneration of human custom and prophetic faith is immediately evident in the very different ways in which Burke and Carlyle deployed the metaphor of clothes. Burke, it will be recalled, liked to compare custom to clothing, which covers the "defects of our naked, shivering nature" with "decent drapery." When the French revolutionaries tore Marie Antoinette from her throne and exposed her as an ordinary woman, they stripped away the "pleasing illusions" without which life becomes brutish and mean. To "cast away the coat of prejudice," Burke said, left men with nothing but their "naked reason"—pathetically inadequate protection against life's rigors.

In Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored), Carlyle elaborated the metaphor of clothes but carried it to conclusions Burke could not have anticipated, much less endorsed. No more than Burke a friend of the Enlightenment, Carlyle nevertheless sided, in retrospect, with the sansculottes, savoring the metaphorical implications of the French label. He saw the French revolution not as a hideous mistake but as a missed opportunity to get to the bottom of things. He had no Benthamite illusions about the dream of "universal Benevolence" that inspired the great divestiture of I789, but his history of the revolution, the book that made him famous, did not acclaim the restoration of order, as Burke and his friends had acclaimed it at the time. The return of order, as Carlyle understood, meant the return of Mammon, "basest of known Gods, even of known devils."

Like Burke, Carlyle had no faith in "naked reason," but he did not therefore wish to see it clothed in custom. He understood the uses of "clothes," but he also understood that it was sometimes necessary for mankind, as the snake sheds his skin, to shed the "solemnities and para

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