or Counsellor Heuschrecke ever
existed; that the six Paper-bags, with their China-ink inscriptions
and multifarious contents, are a mere figment of the brain; that the
'present Editor' is the only person who has ever written upon the
Philosophy of Clothes; and that the _Sartor Resartus_ is the only
treatise that has yet appeared upon that subject;--in short, that the
whole account of the origin of the work before us, which the supposed
Editor relates with so much gravity, and of which we have given a
brief abstract, is, in plain English, a _hum_.

"Without troubling our readers at any great length with our reasons
for entertaining these suspicions, we may remark, that the absence of
all other information on the subject, except what is contained in the
work, is itself a fact of a most significant character. The whole
German press, as well as the particular one where the work purports to
have been printed, seems to be under the control of _Stillschweigen
and Co._,--Silence and Company. If the Clothes-Philosophy and its
author are making so great a sensation throughout Germany as is
pretended, how happens it that the only notice we have of the fact is
contained in a few numbers of a monthly Magazine published at London?
How happens it that no intelligence about the matter has come out
directly to this country? We pique ourselves here in New England upon
knowing at least as much of what is going on in the literary way in
the old Dutch Mother-land as our brethren of the fast-anchored Isle;
but thus far we have no tidings whatever of the 'extensive
close-printed close-meditated volume,' which forms the subject of this
pretended commentary. Again, we would respectfully inquire of the
'present Editor' upon what part of the map of Germany we are to look
for the city of _Weissnichtwo_,--'Know-not-where,'--at which place the
work is supposed to have been printed, and the Author to have resided.
It has been our fortune to visit several portions of the German
territory, and to examine pretty carefully, at different times and for
various purposes, maps of the whole; but we have no recollection of
any such place. We suspect that the city of _Know-not-where_ might be
called, with at least as much propriety, _Nobody-knows-where_, and is
to be found in the kingdom of _Nowhere_. Again, the village of
_Entepfuhl_--'Duck-pond,' where the supposed Author of the work is
said to have passed his youth, and that of _Hinterschlag_, where he
had