r faded Raiment; yet ever, under this, a celestial Essence
thereby rendered visible: and while, on the one hand, he trod the old
rags of Matter, with their tinsels, into the mire, he on the other
everywhere exalted Spirit above all earthly principalities and powers,
and worshipped it, though under the meanest shapes, with a true
Platonic Mysticism. What the man ultimately purposed by thus casting
his Greek-fire into the general Wardrobe of the Universe; what such,
more or less complete, rending and burning of Garments throughout the
whole compass of Civilized Life and Speculation, should lead to; the
rather as he was no Adamite, in any sense, and could not, like
Rousseau, recommend either bodily or intellectual Nudity, and a return
to the savage state: all this our readers are now bent to discover;
this is, in fact, properly the gist and purport of Professor
Teufelsdroeckh's Philosophy of Clothes.

Be it remembered, however, that such purport is here not so much
evolved, as detected to lie ready for evolving. We are to guide our
British Friends into the new Gold-country, and show them the mines;
nowise to dig-out and exhaust its wealth, which indeed remains for all
time inexhaustible. Once there, let each dig for his own behoof, and
enrich himself.

Neither, in so capricious inexpressible a Work as this of the
Professor's can our course now more than formerly be straightforward,
step by step, but at best leap by leap. Significant Indications
stand-out here and there; which for the critical eye, that looks both
widely and narrowly, shape themselves into some ground-scheme of a
Whole: to select these with judgment, so that a leap from one to the
other be possible, and (in our old figure) by chaining them together,
a passable Bridge be effected: this, as heretofore, continues our only
method. Among such light-spots, the following, floating in much wild
matter about _Perfectibility_, has seemed worth clutching at:

'Perhaps the most remarkable incident in Modern History,' says
Teufelsdroeckh, 'is not the Diet of Worms, still less the Battle of
Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other Battle; but an incident
passed carelessly over by most Historians, and treated with some
degree of ridicule by others: namely, George Fox's making to himself a
suit of Leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a
Shoemaker, was one of those, to whom, under ruder or purer form, the
Divine Idea of the Universe is pleased to