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 go sheeted in a thick natural fell?'

6

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, 6 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 threadbare 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 P. ue, no clutch of him, is nowise in contact with him: neither are those ministering Sheriffs and LordLieutenants 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 it is 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 cere'monials, Frankfort Coronations, Royal Drawing-rooms, 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, Admi'rals, 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 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;" 6 or if some drivers, as they do in Norfolk, take a dried bladder 'and put peas in it, the rattle thereof terrifies the boldest!'

4

CHAPTER X.

PURE REASON.

It 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 wagonscience, 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: