of worms, the hides of
oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving
Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the
Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me
more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day,
this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film
of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed-off into the
Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been brushed
thither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rag-grinder, get new material
to grind down. O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I too a
compact all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass of
tailors' and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated,
homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?

'Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to
plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity,
live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is,
and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and
digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to
hate, is his absolute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him
by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of
the World happen _twice_, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be
noteworthy, or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it
occur to your ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he
gold-mantled Prince or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and
his Self are not one and indivisible; that _he_ is naked, without
vestments, till he buy or steal such, and by forethought sew and
button them.

'For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and
how, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorises and
demoralises us, fill me with a certain horror at myself and mankind;
almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season,
you see grazing deliberately with jackets and petticoats (of striped
sacking), in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something
great in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious
wrappages; and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, "a
forked straddling animal with bandy legs"; yet also a Spirit, and
unutterable Mystery of Mysteries.'

CHAPTER IX

ADAMITISM

Let no courteous reader take offence at the opinions broached