Born in 1898 and dying in 1881, Carlyle came to prominence during the late Romantic period, a forceful Anglophone populariser of German Romanticism, before taking up a proverbial seat as the Sage of Victorian Britain. For Nietzsche, writing in 1888, Carlyle’s ‘dyspepsia’ (a condition which he suffered from, though here also a metaphor) was a symptom of his ‘constant passionate dishonesty against himself’, but that was the later Carlyle; as a younger man, he was clearly aware of his ‘anachronism’, insofar as his relevance lied precisely in his ‘lateness’. In his philosophical novel Sartor Resartus, begun in 1831, at the moment of late Romanticism, and published in 1833-34, following a Scottish editor’s attempts to introduce the British reading public to the German Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy of clothes, Carlyle meditates on his own lateness. The novel is often read as a satire of German thought, but this misses the subtlety of Carlyle’s approach; instead, Sartor Resartus is best approached through Schlegel’s idea of Romantic irony, as Haney argued (1978). This irony marks the distance between the ideal it seeks to represent and the necessary failure of its execution, and this paper will take up Haney’s point, informed by de Man (1977), considering the sense in which Romantic irony not only underwrites Carlyle’s own struggles with adopting Romanticism late, but the ways in which he sees that an ironic ‘transcendental buffoonery’ is inscribed in the very structure of Romanticism itself. In so doing, it offers another way to approach Carlyle’s ‘dyspepsia’, with Romantic irony figuring neither a personal quality nor that of the isolated ironist, but one of a ‘typical Romantic’, to rework Nietzsche. Sartor Resartus becomes a late meditation precisely on the lateness of Romanticism more broadly conceived, its irony marking the distance of Romanticism’s own ‘constant passionate dishonesty’ against itself.