olly False. The Honourable Member
complains unmusically that there is 'devil's-dust' in Yorkshire cloth.
Yorkshire cloth,--why, the very Paper I now write on is made, it
seems, partly of plaster-lime well smoothed, and obstructs my writing!
You are lucky if you can find now any good Paper,--any work really
_done_; search where you will, from highest Phantasm apex to lowest
Enchanted basis.

Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now
perambulates London Streets; which my Friend Sauerteig regarded justly
as one of our English notabilities; "the topmost point as yet," said
he, "would it were your culminating and returning point, to which
English Puffery has been observed to reach!"--The Hatter in the Strand
of London, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts a
huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels; sends a man
to drive it through the streets; hoping to be saved _thereby_. He has
not attempted to _make_ better hats, as he was appointed by the
Universe to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very
probably have done; but his whole industry is turned to _persuade_ us
that he has made such! He too knows that the Quack has become God.
Laugh not at him, O reader; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be
comic; he is fast becoming tragic. To me this all-deafening blast of
Puffery, of poor Falsehood grown necessitous, of poor Heart-Atheism
fallen now into Enchanted Workhouses, sounds too surely like a
Doom's-blast! I have to say to myself in old dialect: "God's blessing
is not written on all this; His curse is written on all this!" Unless
perhaps the Universe _be_ a chimera;--some old totally deranged
eightday clock, dead as brass; which the Maker, if there ever was any
Maker, has long ceased to meddle with?--To my Friend Sauerteig this
poor seven-feet Hat-manufacturer, as the topstone of English Puffery,
was very notable.

Alas, that we natives note him little, that we view him as a thing of
course, is the very burden of the misery. We take it for granted, the
most rigorous of us, that all men who have made anything are expected
and entitled to make the loudest possible proclamation of it, and call
on a discerning public to reward them for it. Every man his own
trumpeter; that is, to a really alarming extent, the accepted rule.
Make loudest possible proclamation of your Hat: true proclamation if
that will do; if that will not do, then false proclamation,--to such