s yet visible, no
objection.

'For the rest, these people, animated with the zeal of a new Sect,
display courage and perseverance, and what force there is in man's
nature, though never so enslaved. They affect great purity and
separatism; distinguish themselves by a particular costume (whereof
some notices were given in the earlier part of this Volume); likewise,
so far as possible, by a particular speech (apparently some broken
_Lingua-franca_, or English-French); and, on the whole, strive to
maintain a true Nazarene deportment, and keep themselves unspotted
from the world.

'They have their Temples, whereof the chief, as the Jewish Temple did,
stands in their metropolis; and is named _Almack's_, a word of
uncertain etymology. They worship principally by night; and have their
Highpriests and Highpriestesses, who, however, do not continue for
life. The rites, by some supposed to be of the Menadic sort, or
perhaps with an Eleusinian or Cabiric character, are held strictly
secret. Nor are Sacred Books wanting to the Sect; these they call
_Fashionable Novels_: however, the Canon is not completed, and some
are canonical and others not.

'Of such Sacred Books I, not without expense, procured myself some
samples; and in hope of true insight, and with the zeal which beseems
an Inquirer into Clothes, set to interpret and study them. But wholly
to no purpose: that tough faculty of reading, for which the world will
not refuse me credit, was here for the first time foiled and set at
naught. In vain that I summoned my whole energies (_mich weidlich
anstrengte_), and did my very utmost; at the end of some short space,
I was uniformly seized with not so much what I can call a drumming in
my ears, as a kind of infinite, unsufferable, Jews-harping and
scrannel-piping there; to which the frightfullest species of Magnetic
Sleep soon supervened. And if I strove to shake this away, and
absolutely would not yield, there came a hitherto unfelt sensation, as
of _Delirium Tremens_, and a melting into total deliquium: till at
last, by order of the Doctor, dreading ruin to my whole intellectual
and bodily faculties, and a general breaking-up of the constitution, I
reluctantly but determinedly forbore. Was there some miracle at work
here; like those Fire-balls, and supernal and infernal prodigies,
which, in the case of the Jewish Mysteries, have also more than once
scared-back the Alien? Be this as it may, such failure on my part,
after best