For the rest, be it nowise apprehended, that any personal connection of
ours with Teufelsdrockh, Heuschrecke or this Philosophy of Clothes, can
pervert our judgment, or sway us to extenuate or exaggerate. Powerless, we
venture to promise, are those private Compliments themselves. Grateful
they may well be; as generous illusions of friendship; as fair mementos of
bygone unions, of those nights and suppers of the gods, when, lapped in the
symphonies and harmonies of Philosophic Eloquence, though with baser
accompaniments, the present Editor revelled in that feast of reason, never
since vouchsafed him in so full measure! But what then? _Amicus Plato,
magis amica veritas_; Teufelsdrockh is our friend, Truth is our divinity.
In our historical and critical capacity, we hope we are strangers to all
the world; have feud or favor with no one,--save indeed the Devil, with
whom, as with the Prince of Lies and Darkness, we do at all times wage
internecine war. This assurance, at an epoch when puffery and quackery
have reached a height unexampled in the annals of mankind, and even English
Editors, like Chinese Shopkeepers, must write on their door-lintels _No
cheating here_,--we thought it good to premise.


CHAPTER III.
REMINISCENCES.

To the Author's private circle the appearance of this singular Work on
Clothes must have occasioned little less surprise than it has to the rest
of the world. For ourselves, at least, few things have been more
unexpected. Professor Teufelsdrockh, at the period of our acquaintance
with him, seemed to lead a quite still and self-contained life: a man
devoted to the higher Philosophies, indeed; yet more likely, if he
published at all, to publish a refutation of Hegel and Bardili, both of
whom, strangely enough, he included under a common ban; than to descend, as