Pottery, of Apparitions, of Intoxicating Liquors? Man's whole life and
environment have been laid open and elucidated; scarcely a fragment
or fibre of his Soul, Body, and Possessions, but has been probed,
dissected, distilled, desiccated, and scientifically decomposed: our
spiritual Faculties, of which it appears there are not a few, have their
Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards: every cellular, vascular, muscular
Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies, Bichats.

How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand
Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite
overlooked by Science,--the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or
other cloth; which Man's Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall;
wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole
Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its being? For if,
now and then, some straggling broken-winged thinker has cast an owl's
glance into this obscure region, the most have soared over it altogether
heedless; regarding Clothes as a property, not an accident, as quite
natural and spontaneous, like the leaves of trees, like the plumage of
birds. In all speculations they have tacitly figured man as _a Clothed
Animal_; whereas he is by nature a _Naked Animal_; and only in certain
circumstances, by purpose and device, masks himself in Clothes.
Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after: the more
surprising that we do not look round a little, and see what is passing
under our very eyes.

But here, as in so many other cases, Germany, learned, indefatigable,
deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. It is, after all, a blessing
that, in these revolutionary times, there should be one country where
abstract Thought can still take shelter; that while the din and frenzy
of Catholic Emancipations, and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts of Paris,
deafen every French and every English ear, the German can stand peaceful
on his scientific watch-tower; and, to the raging, struggling multitude
here and elsewhere, solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory blast
of cow-horn, emit his _Horet ihr Herren und lasset's Euch sagen_; in
other words, tell the Universe, which so often forgets that fact, what
o'clock it really is. Not unfrequently the Germans have been blamed for
an unprofitable diligence; as if they struck into devious courses, where
nothing was to be had but the toil of a rough journey; as if, forsa