wn 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 Steam-engine,' 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 intelligence alternate with waste. Selection, order,
appears 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 Street-Advertisements, 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 volatilise 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
Teufelsdroeckh 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 unim