ABSTRACT
Alexander Carlyle's The History of Frederick the Great is so enormous and various that it has been rather difficult to think of, and it has discouraged or even disgusted many readers. Yet there is a way in which one can come closest to knowing Carlyle through this vast work. In small things and large there are traces of Sterne in Carlyle's Frederick Engels, which is his most Shandean work. His sense of the difficulties and yet the importance of history dominates, and his authorial communion with the reader is elaborate. The typographical variety in Frederick the Great is both unique and significant. Carlyle frequently resorts to fine print for most quotations of documents or for summaries of situations or events. Much of Frederick the Great consists of long passages quoted from documentary sources, and of course most of these are in French or German.
