endeavour lies before you. But why," says the Hofrath, and, indeed, say we, "do I dilate on the uses of our Teufelsdröckh's biography? The great Herr Minister von Goethe has penetratingly remarked that man is properly the only object that interests man;' thus I too have noted, that in Weissnichtwo our whole conversation is little or nothing else but biography or autobiography; ever humano-anecdotical (menschlichanecdotisch). Biography is by nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all things; especially biography of distinguished individuals.

"By this time, mein Verehrtester (my most esteemed)," continues he, with an eloquence which, unless the words be purloined from Teufelsdröckh, or some trick of his, as we suspect, is well nigh unaccountable, "by this time, you are fairly plunged (vertieft) in that mighty forest of Clothes-Philosophy; and looking round, as all readers do, with astonishment enough. Such portions and passages as you have already mastered, and brought to paper, could not but awaken a strange curiosity touching the mind they issued from; the perhaps unparalleled psychical mechanism, which manufactured such matter, and emitted it to the light of day. Had Teufelsdröckh also a father and mother? Did he, at one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat? Did he ever, in rapture and tears, clasp a friend's bosom to his? Looks he also wistfully into the long burial-aisle of the past, where only winds, and their low, harsh moan, give inarticulate answer? Has he fought duels? Good Heaven! how did he comport himself when in love? By what singular stairsteps, in short, and subterranean

passages, and sloughs of despair, and steep Pisgah hills, has he reached this wonderful, prophetic Hebron (a true Old-Clothes Jewry) where he now dwells? "To all these natural questions the voice of public history is as yet silent. Certain only that he has been, and is, a pilgrim and traveller from a far country; more or less foot-sore and travel-soiled; has parted with road-companions, fallen among thieves, been poisoned by bad cookery, blistered with bugbites ; nevertheless at every stage (for they have let him pass), has had the bill to discharge. But the whole particulars of his route, his weather-observations, the picturesque sketches he took, though all regularly jotted down (in indelible, sympathetic ink, by an invisible, interior penman,) are these nowhere forthcoming? Perhaps quite lost; one other leaf of that mighty volume (of human memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted, unpublished, unbound up, as waste paper; and rot, the sport of rainy winds?

"No, verehrtester Herr Herausgeber, in no wise! I here, by the unexampled favor you stand in with our sage, send, not a biography only, but an autobiography; at least the materials for such; wherefrom, if I misreckon not, your perspicacity will draw fullest insight; and so the whole Philosophy and Philosopher of Clothes stand clear to the wondering eyes of England; nay, thence, through America, through Hindostan, and the antipodal New Holland, finally conquer (einnehmen) great part of this terrestrial planet!"

And now let the sympathising reader judge of our feeling, when, in place of this same autobiography with "fullest insight," we find-six considerable

PAPER-BAGS, carefully sealed, and marked successively, in gilt China ink, with the symbols of the six southern zodiacal signs, beginning at Libra; in the inside of which sealed bags lie miscellaneous masses of sheets, and oftener shreds and snips, written in Professor Teufelsdröckh's scarce legible cursiv-schrift; and treating of all imaginable things under the zodiac and above it, but of his own personal history only at rare intervals, and then in the most enigmatic manner!

Whole fascicles there are, wherein the Professor, or, as he here, speaking in the third person, calls himself, "the Wanderer," is not once named. Then again, amidst what seems to be a metaphysico-theological disquisition, "detached thoughts on the steamengine," or "the continued possibility of prophecy," we shall meet with some quite private, not unimportant biographical fact. On certain sheets stand dreams, authentic or not, while the circumjacent waking actions are omitted. Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, fly loosely on separate slips, like Sibylline leaves. Interspersed also are long, purely autobiographical delineations, yet without connexion, without recognisable coherence; so unimportant, so superfluously minute, they almost remind us of " P. P. Clerk of this Parish." Thus does famine of intelSelection, order, appears

ligence alternate with waste. to be unknown to the Professor. In all bags the same imbroglio; only perhaps in the bag Capricorn, and those near it, the confusion a little worse confounded. Close by a rather eloquent oration "On receiving the Doctor's Hat," lie washbills marked bezahlt (settled). His travels are indicated by the street-advertisements

of the various cities he has visited; of which streetadvertisements, in most living tongues, here is perhaps the completest collection extant.

So that if the Clothes-volume itself was too like a chaos, we have now, instead of the solar luminary that should still it, the airy Limbo which by intermixture will farther volatilize and discompose it! As we shall perhaps see it our duty ultimately to deposit these six paper bags in the British Museum, farther description, and all vituperation of them, may be spared. Biography or autobiography of Teufelshröckh there is, clearly enough, none to be gleaned here; at most, some sketchy, shadowy, fugitive likeness of him may, by unheard-of efforts, partly of intellect, partly of imagination, on the side of editor and of reader, rise up between them. Only as a gaseous-chaotic appendix to that aqueous-chaotic volume can the contents of the six bags hover round us, and portions thereof be incorporated with our delineation of it.

Daily and nightly does the Editor sit (with green spectacles) deciphering these unimaginable documents from their perplexed cursiv-schrift; collating them with the almost equally unimaginable volume, which stands in legible print. Over such a universal medley of high and low, of hot, cold, moist, and dry, is he here struggling (by union of like with like, which is method) to build a firm bridge for British travellers. Never, perhaps, since our first bridge-builders, sin and death, built that stupendous arch from hell-gate to the earth, did any pontifex, or pontiff, undertake such a task as the present Editor. For in this arch, too, leading as we humbly presume, far otherwards than that

grand, primeval one, the materials are to be fished up from the weltering deep, and down from the simmering air, here one mass, there another, and cunningly cemented, while the elements boil beneath. Nor is there any supernatural force to do it with; but simply the diligence and feeble thinking faculty of an English editor, endeavouring to evolve printed creation out of a German printed and written chaos, wherein, as he shoots to and fro in it, gathering, clutching, piecing the Why to the far-distant Wherefore, his whole faculty and self are like to be swallowed up.

Patiently, under these incessant toils and agitations, does the Editor, dismissing all anger, see his otherwise robust health declining; some fraction of his allotted natural sleep nightly leaving him, and little but an inflamed nervous system to be looked for. What is the use of health, or of life, if not to do some work therewith? And what work nobler than transplanting foreign thought into the barren domestic soil; except, indeed, planting thought of your own, which the fewest are privileged to do? Wild as it looks, this Philosophy of Clothes, can we ever reach its real meaning, promises to reveal new coming eras, the first dim rudiments and already-budding germs of a nobler era, in universal history. Is not such a prize worth some striving? Forward with us, courageous reader; be it towards failure, or towards success! The latter thou sharest with us,

the former also is not all our own.

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