hands in action; and rope and improved drop perform their work.

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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 atribiliar 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, theshall 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 (Hauptund 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 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 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 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,

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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 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;' or if some drivers, as they do in Norfolk, take a dried bladder and put peas in it, the rattle thereof terrifies the boldest!"

CHAPTER X.

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 civilized 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 scalpels," 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 carmen, 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 everywhere "hailfellow 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 skeptical 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;

"Are we opossums? have we natural pouches, like the kangaroo? Or how, without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's-seat, and true pineal gland of the body social: I mean a PURSE?"

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 diabolical 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 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 himself a universe, with azure, starry spaces, and