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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 Govern'ment, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilized 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 Benchesinfandum! infandum! And yet why is the thing impossible? Was not every soul, or rather everybody, 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 no-fashion; 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 De'fender 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;"

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or if some drivers, as they do in Norfolk, take a dried bladder

and put peas in it, the rattle thereof terrifies the boldest!'

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CHAPTER X.

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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 scal'pels,' 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 equilibrium, with other branches of wagon'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 riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and final:

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

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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 degrade man below most animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the gods.

To the eye of vulgar Logic,' says he, 'what is man? An 'omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure 'Reason what is he? A soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition. 'Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under all those wool-rags, 'a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of 'Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with 'them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for him'self a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands 'of Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid 'Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed in, and in'extricably overshrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a 'God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in 'the conflux of Eternities? He feels; power has been given him 'to know, to believe; nay does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments,

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look through? Well said Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of 'gold," the true SHEKINAH is Man:" where else is the God's'PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow man?'

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood; and, through all the vapour and tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment, we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love;-though, alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from view.

Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in this man; and indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings: thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as well as in the poorest Oxgoad and Gipsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright?' Under which point of view the following passage, so strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:

The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or 'even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent. "The 'Philosopher," says the wisest of this age, "must station himself in the middle:" how true! The Philosopher is he to whom the 'Highest has descended, and the Lowest has mounted up; who 'is the equal and kindly brother of all.

'Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether 'woven in Arkwright looms, or by the silent Arachnes that weave 'unrestingly in our Imagination? Or, on the other hand, what 'is there that we cannot love; since all was created by God?

'Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the 'woollen, and fleshly, and official Bank-paper, and State-paper

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