and quite new successive Names,
according as this or the other Able Editor, or Combination of Able
Editors, gains the world's ear. Of the British Newspaper Press,
perhaps the most important of all, and wonderful enough in its secret
constitution and procedure, a valuable descriptive History already
exists, in that language, under the title of _Satan's Invisible World
Displayed_; which, however, by search in all the Weissnichtwo
Libraries, I have not yet succeeded in procuring (_vermoechte nicht
aufzutreiben_).'

Thus does the good Homer not only nod, but snore. Thus does
Teufelsdroeckh, wandering in regions where he had little business,
confound the old authentic Presbyterian Witchfinder with a new,
spurious, imaginary Historian of the _Brittische Journalistik_; and so
stumble on perhaps the most egregious blunder in Modern Literature!

CHAPTER VII

MISCELLANEOUS-HISTORICAL

Happier is our Professor, and more purely scientific and historic,
when he reaches the Middle Ages in Europe, and down to the end of the
Seventeenth Century; the true era of extravagance in Costume. It is
here that the Antiquary and Student of Modes comes upon his richest
harvest. Fantastic garbs, beggaring all fancy of a Teniers or a
Callot, succeed each other, like monster devouring monster in a Dream.
The whole too in brief authentic strokes, and touched not seldom with
that breath of genius which makes even old raiment live. Indeed, so
learned, precise, graphical, and everyway interesting have we found
these Chapters, that it may be thrown-out as a pertinent question for
parties concerned, Whether or not a good English Translation thereof
might henceforth be profitably incorporated with Mr. Merrick's
valuable Work _On Ancient Armour_? Take, by way of example, the
following sketch; as authority for which Paulinus's _Zeitkuerzende
Lust_ (ii. 678) is, with seeming confidence, referred to:

'Did we behold the German fashionable dress of the Fifteenth Century,
we might smile; as perhaps those bygone Germans, were they to rise
again, and see our haberdashery, would cross themselves, and invoke
the Virgin. But happily no bygone German, or man, rises again; thus
the Present is not needlessly trammelled with the Past; and only grows
out of it, like a Tree, whose roots are not intertangled with its
branches, but lie peaceably underground. Nay it is very mournful, yet
not useless, to see and know, how the Greatest and Dearest, in a short
wh