* hands in Action; and Rope and Improved-drop perform * their work.

Thinking reader, the reason seems to me twofold: First, that Man is a Spirit, and bound by invisible bonds to All Men; Secondly, that he wears Clothes, which are the visible emblems of that fact. Has not * your Red hanging-individual a horsehair wig, squirrel · skins, and a plush gown: whereby all mortals know that * he is a JUDGE?—Society, which the more I think of it * astonishes me the more, is founded upon Cloth.

"Often in my atrabiliar moods, when I read of pompous 'ceremonials, Frankfort Coronations, Royal Drawingrooms, Levees, Couchees; and how the ushers and macers and pursuivants are all in waiting; how Duke this is presented by Archduke that, and Colonel A by General B, and innumerable Bishops, Admirals, and * miscellaneous Functionaries, are advancing gallantly to *the Anointed Presence; and I strive, in my remote *privacy, to form a clear picture of that solemnity,-on *a sudden, as by some enchanter's wand, the shall I * speak it?—the Clothes fly off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed *Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand * straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, * after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace * of those afflicted with the like.

Would to Heaven, say we, thou hadst thought right to keep it secret! Who is there now that can read the five columns of Presentations in his Morning Newspaper without a shudder? Hypochondriac men, and all men

are to a certain extent hypochondriac, should be more gently treated. With what readiness our fancy, in this shattered state of the nerves, follows out the consequences which Teufelsdröckh, with a devilish coolness, goes on to draw:

What would Majesty do, could such an accident ‚' befall in reality; should the buttons all simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very Deed, as 'here in Dream? Ach Gott! How each skulks into 'the nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy "(Haupt- und Staats-Action) becomes a PickleherringFarce to weep at, which is the worst kind of Farce; the ' tables (according to Horace), and with them, the whole 'fabric of Government, Legislation, Property, Police, ' and Civilised Society, are dissolved, in wails and 'howls.'

Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords? Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoils on itself, and will not forward with the picture. The Woolsack, the Ministerial, the Opposition Benches-infandum ! infandum! And yet why is the thing impossible? Was not every soul, or rather every body, of these Guardians of our Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night; ‘a forked Radish with a head fantastically carved?' And why might he not, did our stern Fate so order it, walk out to St. Stephen's, as well as into bed, in that nofashion; and there, with other similar Radishes, hold a Bed of Justice? 'Solace of those afflicted with the like!' Unhappy Teufelsdrückh, had man ever such a ' physical or psychical infirmity' before? And now how many, perhaps, may thy unparalleled confession (which

we, even to the sounder British world, and goaded on by Critical and Biographical duty, grudge to re-impart) incurably infect therewith! Art thou the malignest of Sansculottists, or only the maddest?

'It will remain to be examined,' adds the inexorable Teufelsdröckh, in how far the SCARECROW, as a 'Clothed Person, is not also entitled to benefit of clergy, ' and English trial by jury: nay, perhaps considering his high function (for is not he too a Defender of Property, ' and Sovereign armed with the terrors of the Law?), to a ' certain royal Immunity and Inviolability; which, however, misers and the meaner class of persons are not always voluntarily disposed to grant him.'

*

'O my Friends, we are (in Yorick Sterne's 'words) but as "turkeys driven, with a stick and red ' clout, to the market:" or if some drivers, as they do ' in Norfolk, take a dried bladder and put peas in it, the ' rattle thereof terrifies the boldest!'

CHAPTER X.

PURE REASON.

Ir must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is a speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilised Life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and 'Bladders with dried Peas.' To linger among such speculations, longer than mere Science requires, a discerning public can have no wish. For our purposes the simple fact that such a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one), will be sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit about Kings wrestling naked on the green with Carmen,' and the Kings being thrown: dissect them with scalpels,' says Teufelsdröckh; 'the same viscera, tissues, livers, lights, and other Life-tackle are there: examine their spiritual mechanism; the same great Need, great Greed, ' and little Faculty; nay ten to one but the Carman, who ' understands draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, 'something of the laws of unstable and stable equili'brium, with other branches of waggon-science, and has ' actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature, is the more cunningly gifted of the two. Whence, then, their so unspeakable difference? From Clothes.' Much also we shall omit about confusion of Ranks, and Joan

and My Lady, and how it would be every where Hail fellow well met,' and Chaos were come again: all which to any one that has once fairly pictured out the grand mother-idea, Society in a state of Nakedness, will spontaneously suggest itself. Should some sceptical

individual still entertain doubts whether in a World without Clothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bogs of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its brief rivetting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and final:

'Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like 'the Kangaroo? Or how, without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's-seat, and true pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a PURSE?'

Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdröckh; at worst, one knows not whether to hate or to love him. For though in looking at the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference, which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers,—there is that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdröckh is, that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism no less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he de