picked annually from the Laystall; and annually, after being macerated,
hot-pressed, printed on, and sold,--returned thither; filling so many
hungry mouths by the way? Thus is the Laystall, especially with its Rags
or Clothes-rubbish, the grand Electric Battery, and Fountain-of-motion,
from which and to which the Social Activities (like vitreous and resinous
Electricities) circulate, in larger or smaller circles, through the mighty,
billowy, storm-tost chaos of Life, which they keep alive!"--Such passages
fill us, who love the man, and partly esteem him, with a very mixed
feeling.

Farther down we meet with this: "The Journalists are now the true Kings
and Clergy: henceforth Historians, unless they are fools, must write not
of Bourbon Dynasties, and Tudors and Hapsburgs; but of Stamped Broad-sheet
Dynasties, and quite new successive Names, according as this or the other
Able Editor, or Combination of Able Editors, gains the world's ear. Of the
British Newspaper Press, perhaps the most important of all, and wonderful
enough in its secret constitution and procedure, a valuable descriptive
History already exists, in that language, under the title of _Satan's
Invisible World Displayed_; which, however, by search in all the
Weissnichtwo Libraries, I have not yet succeeded in procuring (_vermochte
night aufzutreiben_)."

Thus does the good Homer not only nod, but snore. Thus does Teufelsdrockh,
wandering in regions where he had little business, confound the old
authentic Presbyterian Witchfinder with a new, spurious, imaginary
Historian of the _Brittische Journalistik_; and so stumble on perhaps the
most egregious blunder in Modern Literature!


CHAPTER VII.