red Thinker have
wondered, in his privacy, from what hand that perhaps not ill-written
_Program_ in the Public Journals, with its high _Prize-Questions_ and so
liberal _Prizes_, could have proceeded,--let him now cease such
wonder; and, with undivided faculty, betake himself to the _Concurrenz_
(Competition)."

We ask: Has this same "perhaps not ill-written _Program_," or any other
authentic Transaction of that Property-conserving Society, fallen under
the eye of the British Reader, in any Journal foreign or domestic? If
so, what are those _Prize-Questions_; what are the terms of Competition,
and when and where? No printed Newspaper-leaf, no farther light of any
sort, to be met with in these Paper-bags! Or is the whole business one
other of those whimsicalities and perverse inexplicabilities, whereby
Herr Teufelsdrockh, meaning much or nothing, is pleased so often to play
fast-and-loose with us?

Here, indeed, at length, must the Editor give utterance to a painful
suspicion, which, through late Chapters, has begun to haunt him;
paralyzing any little enthusiasm that might still have rendered his
thorny Biographical task a labor of love. It is a suspicion grounded
perhaps on trifles, yet confirmed almost into certainty by the more and
more discernible humoristico-satirical tendency of Teufelsdrockh, in
whom underground humors and intricate sardonic rogueries, wheel
within wheel, defy all reckoning: a suspicion, in one word, that these
Autobiographical Documents are partly a mystification! What if many
a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction; if here we had no
direct Camera-obscura Picture of the Professor's History; but only some
more or less fantastic Adumbration, symbolically, perhaps significantly
enough, shadowing forth the same! Our theory begins to be that, in
receiving as literally authentic what was but hieroglyphically so,
Hofrath Heuschrecke, whom in that case we scruple not to name Hofrath
Nose-of-Wax, was made a fool of, and set adrift to make fools of others.
Could it be expected, indeed, that a man so known for impenetrable
reticence as Teufelsdrockh would all at once frankly unlock his private
citadel to an English Editor and a German Hofrath; and not rather
deceptively _in_lock both Editor and Hofrath in the labyrinthic
tortuosities and covered-ways of said citadel (having enticed them
thither), to see, in his half-devilish way, how the fools would look?

Of one fool, however, the Herr Prof