e, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat? Did he ever,
in rapture and tears, clasp a friend's bosom to his; looks he also
wistfully into the long burial-aisle of the Past, where only winds,
and their low harsh moan, give inarticulate answer? Has he fought
duels;--good Heaven! how did he comport himself when in Love? By what
singular stair-steps, in short, and subterranean passages, and sloughs
of Despair, and steep Pisgah hills, has he reached this wonderful
prophetic Hebron (a true Old-Clothes Jewry) where he now dwells?

"To all these natural questions the voice of public History is as yet
silent. Certain only that he has been, and is, a Pilgrim, and Traveller
from a far Country; more or less footsore and travel-soiled; has
parted with road-companions; fallen among thieves, been poisoned by bad
cookery, blistered with bug-bites; nevertheless, at every stage (for
they have let him pass), has had the Bill to discharge. But the whole
particulars of his Route, his Weather-observations, the picturesque
Sketches he took, though all regularly jotted down (in indelible
sympathetic-ink by an invisible interior Penman), are these nowhere
forthcoming? Perhaps quite lost: one other leaf of that mighty Volume
(of human Memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted, unpublished, unbound
up, as waste paper; and to rot, the sport of rainy winds?

"No, _verehrtester Herr Herausgeber_, in no wise! I here, by the
unexampled favor you stand in with our Sage, send not a Biography only,
but an Autobiography: at least the materials for such; wherefrom, if I
misreckon not, your perspicacity will draw fullest insight: and so the
whole Philosophy and Philosopher of Clothes will stand clear to
the wondering eyes of England, nay thence, through America, through
Hindostan, and the antipodal New Holland, finally conquer (_einnehmen_)
great part of this terrestrial Planet!"

And now let the sympathizing reader judge of our feeling when, in
place of this same Autobiography with "fullest insight," we find--Six
considerable PAPER-BAGS, carefully sealed, and marked successively, in
gilt China-ink, with the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal Signs,
beginning at Libra; in the inside of which sealed Bags lie miscellaneous
masses of Sheets, and oftener Shreds and Snips, written in Professor
Teufelsdrockh's scarce legible _cursiv-schrift_; and treating of all
imaginable things under the Zodiac and above it, but of his own personal
history only at rare interv