the body, by introduction of Bran,--our Professor fails not to comment on
that luckless Courtier, who having seated himself on a chair with some
projecting nail on it, and therefrom rising, to pay his _devoir_ on the
entrance of Majesty, instantaneously emitted several pecks of dry
wheat-dust: and stood there diminished to a spindle, his galloons and
slashes dangling sorrowful and flabby round him. Whereupon the Professor
publishes this reflection:--

"By what strange chances do we live in History? Erostratus by a torch;
Milo by a bullock; Henry Darnley, an unfledged booby and bustard, by his
limbs; most Kings and Queens by being born under such and such a
bed-tester; Boileau Despreaux (according to Helvetius) by the peck of a
turkey; and this ill-starred individual by a rent in his breeches,--for no
Memoirist of Kaiser Otto's Court omits him. Vain was the prayer of
Themistocles for a talent of Forgetting: my Friends, yield cheerfully to
Destiny, and read since it is written."--Has Teufelsdrockh, to be put in
mind that, nearly related to the impossible talent of Forgetting, stands
that talent of Silence, which even travelling Englishmen manifest?

"The simplest costume," observes our Professor, "which I anywhere find
alluded to in History, is that used as regimental, by Bolivar's Cavalry, in
the late Colombian wars. A square Blanket, twelve feet in diagonal, is
provided (some were wont to cut off the corners, and make it circular): in
the centre a slit is effected eighteen inches long; through this the
mother-naked Trooper introduces his head and neck; and so rides shielded
from all weather, and in battle from many strokes (for he rolls it about
his left arm); and not only dressed, but harnessed and draperied."

With which picture of a State of Nature, affecting by its singularity, and
Old-Roman contempt of the superfluous, we shall quit this part of our