1

For

even the Kilmarnock nightcap is not forgotten. most part, too, we must admit that the Learning, heterogeneous as it is, and tumbled-down quite pell-mell, is true concentrated and purified Learning, the drossy parts smelted out and thrown aside.

Philosophical reflections intervene, and sometimes touching pictures of human life. Of this sort the following has surprised us. The first purpose of Clothes, as our Professor imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament 'Miserable indeed,' says he, 'was the condition of the Aboriginal Savage, glaring fiercely from under his fleece of hair, which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung round him like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild-fruits; or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in morasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements, without arms, save the ball of heavy Flint, to which, that his sole possession and defence might not be lost, he had attached a long cord of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling it with deadly unerring skill. Nevertheless, the pains of Hunger and Revenge once satisfied, his next care was not Comfort but Decoration (Putz). Warmth he found in the toils of the chase; or amid dried leaves, in his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto: but for Decoration he must have Clothes. among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to Clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decoration, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilised countries.

Nay,

'Reader, the heaven-inspired melodious Singer; loftiest Serene Highness; nay thy own amber-locked, snow-androse-bloom Maiden,2 worthy to glide sylphlike almost on air, whom thou lovest, worshippest as a divine Presence,

1 Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, was celebrated for its manufacture of nightcaps.

2 Snow-and-rose-bloom. Like the Spring (said Jean Paul), which begins with snowdrops, and ends with roses and pinks.

which, indeed, symbolically taken, she is, has descended, like thyself, from that same hair-mantled, flint-hurling Aboriginal Anthropophagus ! 1 Out of the eater cometh forth meat; out of the strong cometh forth sweetness.2 What changes are wrought, not by Time, yet in Time! For not Mankind only, but all that Mankind does or beholds, is in continual growth, re-genesis and self-perfecting vitality. Cast forth thy Act, thy Word, into the ever-living, ever-working Universe: it is a seed-grain that cannot die; unnoticed today (says one 3), it will be found flourishing as a Banyan-grove (perhaps, alas, as a Hemlock-forest !5) after a thousand years.

4

'He who first shortened the labour of Copyists by device of Movable Types® was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole. new Democratic world:7 he had invented the Art of Printing. The first ground handful of Nitre, Sulphur, and Charcoal drove Monk Schwartz's pestle through the ceiling: what will the last do? Achieve the final undisputed prostration of Force under Thought, of Animal courage. under Spiritual. A simple invention it was in the oldworld Grazier, -sick of lugging his slow Ox about the

1 Anthropophagus.

A man-eating savage.

Merry Wives of Windsor, IV. v. 10.

2 Out of the eater, etc. Judges xiv. 14.

3 Says one. (?) Matt. xiii. 31; Eccles. xi. 1.

4

Othello, I. iii. 144;

Banyan-grove. An Indian fig-tree. "The first seed is the essential thing any branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and so, in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the parent of it all" (On Heroes, p. 30). Vide Milton, Paradise Lost, ix. 1102 ff.

5 Hemlock-forest. i.e. a jungle of hemlock, a plant from which a poison (conia) may be extracted. Socrates was poisoned with it. Hosea

X.

Movable Types. Johannes Faust, a wealthy goldsmith of Mentz, entered into partnership with Gutenberg in 1450; the latter had twelve years previously adopted movable metal types for printing.

7 Democratic world, etc. On Heroes, p. 152.

8 Monk Schwartz. Gunpowder was known in India and China in early times. Roger Bacon described its composition in 1216. Schwartz's discovery of the process of granulating in 1320 first rendered it practically efficient.

1

country till he got it bartered for corn or oil,-to take a piece of Leather, and thereon scratch or stamp the mere Figure of an Ox (or Pecus); put it in his pocket, and call it Pecunia, Money. Yet hereby did Barter grow Sale, the Leather Money is now Golden and Paper, and all miracles have been out-miracled: for there are Rothschilds and English National Debts; 2 and whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,--to the length of sixpence.Clothes too, which began in foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! Increased Security and pleasurable Heat soon followed: but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (Schaam, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us.

3

4

'But, on the whole,' continues our eloquent Professor, 'Man is a Tool-using Animal (Handthierendes Thier). Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs, lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise Tools: with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron, as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere

5

1 Pecunia, Money. So Jean Paul in Quintus Fixlein.

2 Rothschilds and English National Debts. Examples of immense sums of money. The English National Debt is over £600,000,000.

3 Man is a Tool-using Animal. A note in Boswell's Journal of a Tour, 15th August, is the probable source of these various definitions of Man.

4 Feeblest of bipeds! Cf. Hamlet, II. ii. 321; Pascal's Thoughts (Taylor's), I. vi.; R. L. Stevenson's Pulvis et Umbra.

5 Quintals. Hundredweights.

*

do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.'

Here may we not, for a moment, interrupt the stream of Oratory with a remark, that this Definition of the Toolusing Animal, appears to us, of all that Animal-sort, considerably the precisest and best? Man is called a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also laugh, or attempt to do it; and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher? Teufelsdröckh himself, as we said, laughed only once. Still less do we make of that other French Definition of the Cooking Animal; which, indeed, for rigorous scientific purposes, is as good as useless. Can

a Tartar1 be said to cook, when he only readies his steak by riding on it? Again, what Cookery does the Greenlander use, beyond stowing-up his whale-blubber, as a marmot, in the like case, might do? Or how would Monsieur Ude 2 prosper among those Orinocco Indians who, according to Humboldt, lodge in crow-nests, on the branches of trees; and, for half the year, have no victuals but pipe-clay, the whole country being under water? But, on the other hand, show us the human being, of any period or climate, without his Tools: those very Caledonians, as we saw, had their Flint-ball, and Thong to it, such as no brute has or can have.

'Man is a Tool-using Animal,' concludes Teufelsdröckh in his abrupt way; 'of which truth Clothes are but one example and surely if we consider the interval between the first wooden Dibble fashioned by man, and those Liverpool Steam-carriages, or the British House of Commons,

1 Tartar.

5

Vide Grey's Butler's Hudibras, I. ii. 275, note.

2 Monsieur Ude. Louis E. Ude, chief cook to the Earl of Sefton, and author of La Science de Gueule; an English version of which reached its tenth edition in 1829.

3 Humboldt, Alexander von (1769-1859), a German naturalist who explored a large tract of South America.

4 Dibble. A short pointed stick used for planting seeds or potatoes. Winter's Tale, IV. iv. 100.

"

5

Liverpool Steam-carriages. In 1829, George Stephenson's engine, 'Rocket," gained the £500 prize offered by the Directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The "Rocket afterwards travelled

thirty-five miles an hour.

""

He digs up

we shall note what progress he has made. certain black stones from the bosom of the earth, and says to them, Transport me and this luggage at the rate of five-andthirty miles an hour; and they do it: he collects, apparently by lot, six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous individuals, and says to them, Make this nation toil for us, bleed for us, hunger and sorrow and sin for us; and they do it.'

CHAPTER VI

APRONS

ONE of the most unsatisfactory Sections in the whole Volume is that on Aprons. What though stout old Gao,1 the Persian Blacksmith, 'whose Apron, now indeed hidden under jewels, because raised in revolt which proved successful, is still the royal standard of that country'; what though John Knox's Daughter, who threatened Sovereign Majesty that she would catch her husband's head in her Apron, rather than he should lie and be a bishop'; what though the Landgravine Elizabeth,3 with many other Apron worthies,-figure here? An idle wire-drawing spirit, sometimes even a tone of levity, approaching to conventional satire, is too clearly discernible. What for example, are we to make of such sentences as the following?

1 Gao. Kaweh, or Kawah, the Persian blacksmith (whose sons were slain to feed the serpents of the monarch Zohâk) placed his leathern apron on a spear, and with that as standard raised a revolt. Feridoon then got the throne and made Kaweh's apron the royal standard, which it continued to be until the Mohammedan conquest. Vide "Persia," in The Story of the Nations.

2 John Knox's Daughter. Elizabeth Knox married John Welch, minister of Ayr. After her husband's banishment, she obtained access to King James and petitioned for her husband's return to Scotland. The King offered to permit it, if Welch would submit to the established government of the Church by Bishops. Mrs. Welch then, holding out her apron, said: "Please your Majesty, I'd rather kep his head there" (vide M'Crie's Life of Knox). Mrs. Carlyle (née J. B. Welsh) claimed descent from John Welch and Elizabeth Knox.

3 Landgravine Elizabeth. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-31), who, when her husband forbade her to feed the poor, concealed bread for them in her apron.