Philosophy of Clothes, can
pervert our judgment, or sway us to extenuate or exaggerate. Powerless,
we venture to promise, are those private Compliments themselves.
Grateful they may well be; as generous illusions of friendship; as fair
mementos of bygone unions, of those nights and suppers of the gods,
when, lapped in the symphonies and harmonies of Philosophic Eloquence,
though with baser accompaniments, the present Editor revelled in that
feast of reason, never since vouchsafed him in so full measure! But what
then? _Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas_; Teufelsdrockh is our friend,
Truth is our divinity. In our historical and critical capacity, we hope
we are strangers to all the world; have feud or favor with no one,--save
indeed the Devil, with whom, as with the Prince of Lies and Darkness, we
do at all times wage internecine war. This assurance, at an epoch when
puffery and quackery have reached a height unexampled in the annals of
mankind, and even English Editors, like Chinese Shopkeepers, must
write on their door-lintels _No cheating here_,--we thought it good to
premise.

CHAPTER III. REMINISCENCES.

To the Author's private circle the appearance of this singular Work on
Clothes must have occasioned little less surprise than it has to the
rest of the world. For ourselves, at least, few things have been more
unexpected. Professor Teufelsdrockh, at the period of our acquaintance
with him, seemed to lead a quite still and self-contained life: a man
devoted to the higher Philosophies, indeed; yet more likely, if he
published at all, to publish a refutation of Hegel and Bardili, both of
whom, strangely enough, he included under a common ban; than to descend,
as he has here done, into the angry noisy Forum, with an Argument that
cannot but exasperate and divide. Not, that we can remember, was the
Philosophy of Clothes once touched upon between us. If through the
high, silent, meditative Transcendentalism of our Friend we detected
any practical tendency whatever, it was at most Political, and towards a
certain prospective, and for the present quite speculative, Radicalism;
as indeed some correspondence, on his part, with Herr Oken of Jena was
now and then suspected; though his special contributions to the _Isis_
could never be more than surmised at. But, at all events, nothing Moral,
still less anything Didactico-Religious, was looked for from him.

Well do we recollect the last words he spoke in our hearing; whic