sight, 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, Jew's-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 efforts, must excuse the
imperfection of this sketch; altogether incomplete, yet the completest I
could give of a Sect too singular to be omitted.

"Loving my own life and senses as I do, no power shall induce me, as a
private individual, to open another _Fashionable Novel_. But luckily,
in this dilemma, comes a hand from the clouds; whereby if not victory,
deliverance is held out to me. Round one of those Book-packages, which
the _Stillschweigen'sche Buchhandlung_ is in the habit of importing
from England, come, as is usual, various waste printed-sheets
(_Maculatur-blatter_), by way of interior wrappage: into these the
Clothes-Philosopher, with a certain Mahometan reverence even for
waste-paper, where curious knowledge will sometimes hover, disdains not
to cast his eye. Readers may judge of his astonishment when on such
a defaced stray-sheet, probably the outcast fraction of some English
Periodical, such as they name _Magazine_, appears something like a
Dissertation on this very subject of _Fashionable Novels_! It sets out,
indeed, chiefly from a Secular point of view; directing itself, not
without asperity, against some to me unknown individual named _Pelham_,
who seems to be a Mystagogue, and leading Teacher and Preacher of the
S