long. Unconscious, seemingly, that it has been killed thrice and four
times already; and that indeed, except in the realm of Nightmare, it
never was alive, or needed any killing; belief in it, doubt upon it
(I must grieve to inform the Duc de Rovigo and honorable persons
concerned), being evidence conclusive that you have not yet the faintest
preliminary shadow of correct knowledge about Friedrich or his habits or
affairs, and that you ought first to try and acquire some.

To me argument on this subject would have been too unendurable. But
argument there was on it, by persons capable and willing, more than one:
and in result this surprising brand-new London moon-calf of a MATINEES
was smitten through, and slit in pieces, for the fifth time,--as if
that could have hurt it much! "MIT DER DUMMHEIT," sings Schiller; "Human
Stupidity is stronger than the very Gods." However, in the course of
these new inspections into matters long since obsolete, there did--what
may truly be considered as a kind of profit by this Resuscitating of the
moon-calf MATINEES upon afflicted mankind, and is a net outcome from it,
real, though very small--some light rise as to the origin and genesis of
MATINEES; some twinkles of light, and, in the utterly dark element, did
disclose other monstrous extinct shapes looming to right and left of
said monster: and, in a word, the Authorship of MATINEES, and not of
MATINEES only, becomes now at last faintly visible or guessable. To
one of those industrious Matadors, as we may call them, Slayers of this
moon-calf for the fourth or fifth time, I owe the following Note; which,
on verifying, I can declare to be trustworthy:--

"The Author of MATINEES, it is nearly certain", says my Correspondent,
"is actually a 'M. de Bonneville,'--contrary to what you wrote five
years ago. [A.D. 1858 (SUPRA, v. 165, 166).] Not indeed the Bonneville
who is found in Dictionaries, who is visibly impossible; but a
Bonneville of the preceding generation, who was Marechal de Saxe's
Adjutant or Secretary, old enough to have been the Uncle or the Father
of that revolutionary Bonneville. Marechal de Saxe died November 30th,
1750; this senior Bonneville, still a young man, had been with him to
Potsdam on visit there. Bonneville, conscious of genius, and now out of
employment, naturally went thither again; lived a good deal there, or
went between France and there: and authentic History knows of him, by
direct evidence, and by reflex, th