'and other racketting, held over that spot of God's 'Earth,—if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the 'Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality? Fox turned 'from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather-parings and his Bible. Mountains of encum'brance, higher than Etna, had been heaped over that 'Spirit but it was a Spirit, and would not lie buried 'there. Through long days and nights of silent agony, 'it struggled and wrestled, with a man's force, to be 'free how its prison-mountains heaved and swayed 'tumultuously, as the giant spirit shook them to this 'hand and that, and emerged into the light of Heaven! 'That Leicester shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than any Vatican or Loretto-shrine." So 'bandaged, and hampered, and hemmed in," groaned he, "with thousand requisitions, obligations, straps, 'tatters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor move: not my own am I, but the World's; and Time flies fast, ' and Heaven is high, and Hell is deep: Man! bethink 'thee, if thou hast power of Thought! Why not; 'what binds me here? Want! Want!-Ha, of what? 'Will all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across 'into that far Land of Light? Only Meditation can, ' and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods: the 'hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild berries feed me; 'and for Clothes, cannot I stitch myself one perennial Suit of Leather!"

་

'Historical Oil-painting,' continues Teufelsdröckh, is one of the Arts I never practised; therefore shall I not decide whether this subject were easy of execution on the canvass. Yet often has it seemed to me as if 'such first outflashing of man's Freewill, to lighten, more

and more into Day, the Chaotic Night that threatened to engulf him in its hindrances and its horrors, were 'properly the only grandeur there is in History. Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and under'standing heart, picture George Fox on that morning, ' when he spreads out his cutting-board for the last time, ' and cuts cow-hides by unwonted patterns, and stitches 'them together into one continuous all-including Case, 'the farewell service of his awl! Stitch away, thou noble 'Fox every prick of that little instrument is pricking 'into the heart of Slavery, and World-worship, and the Mammon-god. Thy elbows jerk, as in strong swimmerstrokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her Work'house and Rag-fair, into lands of true Liberty; were "the work done, there is in broad Europe one Free Man, ' and thou art he!

'Thus from the lowest depth there is a path to the 'loftiest height and for the Poor also a Gospel has been 'published. Surely, if, as D'Alembert asserts, my illus'trious namesake, Diogenes, was the greatest man of 'Antiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then by 'stronger reason is George Fox the greatest of the Mo'derns; and greater than Diogenes himself: for he too 'stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood, casting 'aside all props and shoars; yet not, in half-savage 'Pride, undervaluing the Earth; valuing it rather, as a ' place to yield him warmth and food, he looks Heaven'ward from his Earth, and dwells in an element of 'Mercy and Worship, with a still Strength, such as the 'Cynic's Tub did nowise witness. Great, truly, was that Tub; a temple from which man's dignity and divinity

was scornfully preached abroad: but greater is the Leather Hull, for the same sermon was preached there, and not in Scorn but in Love.'

George Fox's 'perennial suit,' with all that it held, has been worn quite into ashes for nigh two centuries: why, in a discussion on the Perfectibility of Society, reproduce it now? Not out of blind sectarian partisanship: Teufelsdröckh himself is no Quaker; with all his pacific tendencies, did we not see him, in that scene at the North Cape, with the Archangel Smuggler, exhibit fire-arms?

For us, aware of his deep Sansculottism, there is more meant in this passage than meets the ear. At the same time, who can avoid smiling at the earnestness and Bœotian simplicity (if indeed there be not an underhand satire in it), with which that Incident' is here brought forward; and, in the Professor's ambiguous way, as clearly perhaps as he durst in Weissnichtwo, recommended to imitation! Does Teufelsdröckh anticipate that, in this age of refinement, any considerable class of the community, by way of testifying against the Mammon-god,' and escaping from what he calls Vanity's Work house and Ragfair,' where doubtless some of them are toiled and whipped and hoodwinked sufficiently,— will sheathe themselves in close-fitting cases of Leather? The idea is ridiculous in the extreme. Will Majesty lay aside its robes of state, and Beauty its frills and traingowns, for a second skin of tanned hide? By which change Huddersfield and Manchester, and Coventry and Paisley, and the Fancy-Bazaar, were reduced to hungry solitudes; and only Day and Martin could profit. For

neither would Teufelsdröckh's mad daydream, here as we presume covertly intended, of levelling Society (levelling it indeed with a vengeance, into one huge drowned marsh!), and so attaining the political effects of Nudity without its frigorific or other consequences,-be thereby realised. Would not the rich man purchase a waterproof suit of Russia Leather; and the highborn Belle step forth in red or azure morocco, lined with shamoy: the black cowhide being left to the Drudges and Gibeonites of the world; and so all the old Distinctions re-established?

Or has the Professor his own deeper intention; and laughs in his sleeve at our strictures and glosses, which indeed are but a part thereof?

CHAPTER II.

CHURCH CLOTHES.

Nor less questionable is his Chapter on Church Clothes, which has the farther distinction of being the shortest in the Volume. We here translate it entire :

'By Church Clothes, it need not be premised, that I mean infinitely more than Cassocks and Surplices; ' and do not at all mean the mere haberdasher Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in. Far from it! Church 'Clothes are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the Vestures, under which men have at various periods embodied and 'represented for themselves the Religious Principle; 'that is to say, invested the Divine Idea of the World 'with a sensible and practically active Body, so that it 'might dwell among them as a living and life-giving WORD.

'These are unspeakably the most important of all the vestures and garnitures of Human Existence. They are first spun and woven, I may say, by that wonder of 'wonders, SOCIETY; for it is still only when "two or three are gathered together" that Religion, spiritually 'existent, and indeed indestructible however latent, in ' each, first outwardly manifests itself (as with "cloven tongues of fire") and seeks to be embodied in a visible 'Communion, and Church Militant. Mystical, more 'than magical, is that Communing of Soul with Soul,