who
cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but
his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

Considered as an Author, Herr Teufelsdrockh has one scarcely pardonable
fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want of arrangement. In this
remarkable Volume, it is true, his adherence to the mere course of Time
produces, through the Narrative portions, a certain show of outward
method; but of true logical method and sequence there is too little.
Apart from its multifarious sections and subdivisions, the Work
naturally falls into two Parts; a Historical-Descriptive, and a
Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of
demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps, and
indents, and indeed runs quite through the other. Many sections are of
a debatable rubric, or even quite nondescript and unnamable; whereby the
Book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like
some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and
flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French
mustard, were hurled into one huge tureen or trough, and the hungry
Public invited to help itself. To bring what order we can out of this
Chaos shall be part of our endeavor.

CHAPTER V. THE WORLD IN CLOTHES.

"As Montesquieu wrote a _Spirit of Laws_," observes our Professor, "so
could I write a _Spirit of Clothes_; thus, with an _Esprit des
Lois_, properly an _Esprit de Coutumes_, we should have an _Esprit de
Costumes_. For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man
proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious
operations of the mind. In all his Modes, and habilatory endeavors, an
Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the Cloth are
the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of
a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded
mantles, based on light sandals; tower up in high headgear, from amid
peaks, spangles and bell-girdles; swell out in starched ruffs, buckram
stuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or girth himself into separate
sections, and front the world an Agglomeration of four limbs,--will
depend on the nature of such Architectural Idea: whether Grecian,
Gothic, Later Gothic, or altogether Modern, and Parisian or
Anglo-Dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in Color! From the soberest
drab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritual idios