sed to prove, as it were, the opening of
a new mine-shaft, wherein the whole world of Speculation might
henceforth dig to unknown depths. More especially it may now be
declared that Professor Teufelsdroeckh's acquirements, patience of
research, philosophic and even poetic vigour, are here made
indisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and
tortuosity and manifold ineptitude; that, on the whole, as in opening
new mine-shafts is not unreasonable, there is much rubbish in his
Book, though likewise specimens of almost invaluable ore. A paramount
popularity in England we cannot promise him. Apart from the choice of
such a topic as Clothes, too often the manner of treating it betokens
in the Author a rusticity and academic seclusion, unblamable, indeed
inevitable in a German, but fatal to his success with our public.

Of good society Teufelsdroeckh appears to have seen little, or has
mostly forgotten what he saw. He speaks-out with a strange plainness;
calls many things by their mere dictionary names. To him the
Upholsterer is no Pontiff, neither is any Drawing-room a Temple, were
it never so begilt and overhung: 'a whole immensity of Brussels
carpets, and pier-glasses, and or-molu,' as he himself expresses it,
'cannot hide from me that such Drawing-room is simply a section of
Infinite Space, where so many God-created Souls do for the time meet
together.' To Teufelsdroeckh the highest Duchess is respectable, is
venerable; but nowise for her pearl bracelets and Malines laces: in
his eyes, the star of a Lord is little less and little more than the
broad button of Birmingham spelter in a Clown's smock; 'each is an
implement,' he says, 'in its kind; a tag for _hooking-together_; and,
for the rest, was dug from the earth, and hammered on a smithy before
smith's fingers.' Thus does the Professor look in men's faces with a
strange impartiality, a strange scientific freedom; like a man
unversed in the higher circles, like a man dropped thither from the
Moon. Rightly considered, it is in this peculiarity, running through
his whole system of thought, that all these short-comings,
over-shootings, and multiform perversities, take rise: if indeed they
have not a second source, also natural enough, in his Transcendental
Philosophies, and humour of looking at all Matter and Material things
as Spirit; whereby truly his case were but the more hopeless, the more
lamentable.

To the Thinkers of this nation, however, of which c