In respect of style our Author manifests the same genial capability, marred too often by the same rudeness, inequality, and apparent want of intercourse with the higher classes. Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigor, a true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendor from Jove's head; a rich, idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint, tricksy turns; all the graces and terrors of a wild imagination, wedded to the clearest intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, so often intervene! On the whole, Professor Teufelsdröckh is not a cultivated writer. Of his sentences, perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tag-rag hanging from them; a few even sprawl cut helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods, there lies in him a singular attraction. A wild tone pervades the whole utterance of the note and regulator; now screwing the song of spirits, or else the fiends; now sinking in cadences, not without melodious heartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch, when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremely difficult to fix. Up to this hour we have never

man, like its keyitself aloft, as into shrill mockery of

fully satisfied ourselves whether it is a tone and hum of real humor, which we reckon among the very highest qualities of genius, or some remote echo of mere insanity and inanity, which doubtless ranks below the very lowest.

Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse, do we still lie with regard to the Professor's moral feeling. Gleams of an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite pity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, and keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter, sardonic humor, if, indeed, it be not mere stolid callousness, that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial round, after all, were but some huge, foolish whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled; in which only children could take interest. His look, as we mentioned, is probably the gravest ever seen; yet it is not of that cast-iron gravity, frequent enough among our own chancery suitors; but rather the gravity as of some silent, high-encircled mountain-pool, perhaps the crater of an extinct volcano, into whose black deeps you fear to gaze; those eyes, those lights that sparkle in it, may indeed be reflexes of the heavenly stars, but perhaps also glances from the region of nether fire!

Certainly a most involved, self-secluded, altogether enigmatic nature, this of Teufelsdröekh! Here, however, we gladly recall to mind that once we saw him laugh; once only, perhaps it was the first and last time in his life; but then such a peal of laughter, enough to have awakened the seven sleepers! It was of Jean Paul's doing; some single billow in that vast world-mahlstrom of humor, with its heaven-kissing coruscations, which is now, alas, all congealed in the frost of death! The large bodied poet and the small, both large enough in soul, sat talking miscellaneously together, the present Editor being privileged to listen. And now Paul, in his serious way, was giving one of those inimitable "extra harangues; and, as it chanced, on the proposal for a cast-metal king. Gradually a light kindled in our Professor's eyes and face, a beaming, mantling, loveliest light; through those murky features, a radiant, ever young Apollo looked; and he burst forth like the neighing of all Tattersall's, tears streaming down his cheeks, pipe held aloft, foot clutched into the air,-loud, longcontinuing, uncontrollable; a laugh not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel. The present Editor, who laughed indeed, yet with measure, began to fear all was not right; however, Teufelsdröckh composed himself, and sank into his old stillness; on his inscrutable countenance there was, if any thing, a slight look of shame; and Richter himself could not rouse him again. Readers who have any tincture of psychology know how much is to be inferred from this; and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether

irreclaimably bad. How much lies in laughter; the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice; the fewest are able to laugh what can be called laughing, but only sniff, and titter, and snigger from the throat outwards; or, at best, produce some whiffling, husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool; of none such comes good. The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

Considered as an author, Herr Teufelsdröckh has one scarcely pardonable fault, doubtless his worst; an almost total want of arrangement. In this remarkable volume, it is true, his adherence to the mere course of time produces, through the narrative portions, a certain show of outward method; but of true logical method and sequence there is too little. Apart from its multifarious sections and subdivisions, the work naturally falls into two parts; a historical descriptive, and a philosophical speculative; but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each part overlaps, and indents, and indeed runs quite through the other. Many sections are of a debatable rubric, or even quite nondescript and unnamable; whereby the book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us, like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oystersauce, lettuces, Rhine wine, and French mustard, were hurled into one huge tureen or trough, and the hungry

public invited to help itself. To bring what order we can out of this chaos shall be part of our endeavour.

CHAPTER V.

THE WORLD IN CLOTHES.

"As Montesquieu wrote a Spirit of Laws," observes our Professor, "so could I write a Spirit of Clothes; thus, with an Esprit des Loix, properly an Esprit des Coutumes, we should have an Esprit des Costumes. For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. In all his modes and habilitory endeavours an architectural idea will be found lurking; his body and the cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautiful edifice, of a person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded mantles, based on light sandals; tower up in high headgear, from amid peaks, spangles, and bell-girdles; swell out in starched ruffs, buckram stuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or girth himself into separate sections, and front the world an agglomeration of four limbs,will depend on the nature of such architectural idea; whether Grecian, Gothie, Later-Gothic, or altogether Modern, and Parisian or Anglo-dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in color! From the soberest drab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies unfold themselves in choice of color; if the cut

1