name, according to year and place, such phenomenon is distinguished? In that one word lie included mysterious volumes. Nay, now when the reign of folly is over, or altered, and thy clothes are not for triumph but for defence, hast thou always worn them perforce, and as a consequence of Man's Fall; never rejoiced in them as in a warm movable House, a Body round thy Body, wherein that strange THEE of thine sat snug, defying all variations of Climate? Girt with thick double-milled kerseys; halfburied under shawls and broadbrims, and overalls and mudboots, thy very fingers cased in doeskin and mittens, thou hast bestrode that 'Horse I ride;' and, though it were in wild winter, dashed through the world, glorying in it as if thou wert its lord. In vain did the sleet beat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable, felted or woven, case of wool. In vain did the winds howl,-forests sounding and creaking, deep calling unto deep, and the storms heap themselves together into one huge Arctic whirlpool: thou flewest through the middle thereof, striking fire from the highway; wild music hummed in thy ears, thou too wert as a 'sailor of the air; the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds was thy element and propitiously wafting tide. Without Clothes, without bit or saddle, what hadst thou been; what had thy fleet quadruped been?-Nature is good, but she is not the best: here truly was the victory of Art over Nature. A thunderbolt indeed might have pierced thee; all short of this thou couldst defy.

Or, cries the courteous reader, has your Teufelsdröckh forgotten what he said lately about Aboriginal Savages,' and their condition miserable indeed?' Would he have all this unsaid; and us betake ourselves again to the

' matted cloak,' and fell?'

go

sheeted in a thick natural

Nowise, courteous reader! The Professor knows full well what he is saying; and both thou and we, in our haste, do him wrong. If Clothes, in these times, 'so tailorise and demoralise us,' have they no redeeming value; can they not be altered to serve better; must they of necessity be thrown to the dogs? The truth is, Teufelsdröckh, though a Sansculottist, is no Adamite: and much perhaps as he might wish to go forth before this degenerate age as a Sign,' would nowise wish to do it, as those old Adamites did, in a state of Nakedness. The utility of Clothes is altogether apparent to him: nay perhaps he has an insight into their more recondite, and almost mystic qualities, what we might call the omnipotent virtue of Clothes, such as was never before vouchsafed to any man. For example:

'You see two individuals,' he writes, 'one dressed in 'fine Red, the other in coarse thread bare Blue Red 'says to Blue, "Be hanged and anatomised;" Blue 'hears with a shudder, and (O wonder of wonders!) 'marches sorrowfully to the gallows; is there noosed up, 'vibrates his hour, and the surgeons dissect him, and fit ' his bones into a skeleton for medical purposes. How is this; or what make ye of your Nothing can act but 'where it is? Red has no physical hold of Blue, no ' clutch of him, is nowise in contact with him : neither are those ministering Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants and 'Hangmen and Tipstaves so related to commanding Red, that he can tug them hither and thither; but each 'stands distinct within his own skin. Nevertheless, as 'it is spoken, so is it done: the articulated Word sets all

'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 Pickleherring'Farce 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 Teufelsdröckh, 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, how• ever, 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 !'