ather 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 stair-steps, 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 footsore and travel-soiled;
has parted with road-companions; fallen among thieves, been poisoned
by bad cookery, blistered with bug-bites; 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Volume (of human Memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted, unpublished,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 to rot, the sport of rainy winds?

'No, _verehrtester Herr Herausgeber_, in no wise! I here, by the
unexampled favour 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 will
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 Teufelsdroeckh's scarce legible _cursiv-schrift_; and
treating of all imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it, but
of his o