their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save
people from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own
passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there
can be no doubt after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you
the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated people, that's to
say, if we choose. I tell you, Eve, that I have it here in black and
white among my excerpts and collectanea that I shall be the forefather,
ancestor, and Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton,
Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all in all, who
are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if not abler. Eve,
thou active and important member of the fruit-bearing jointstock
company, or productive class of the state (consisting of thyself and
this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few hours of
exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a
cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at
length kneel down, and cry, "Good morning, my children! Such of you as
are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise
man; but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold
all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood
relations too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have
stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples,
and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no
orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their first parents
seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had never known what
hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all
knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature." And then I shall
arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on the bosom
of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms around him,
say, "Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I could just
have shown _thee_ only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the
queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was
delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I'm sure she would
have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.'"

"And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest
ever on the warm, heaving breast of

                                          "Thy Friend.

                 "_Postscript and Clausula Salutaris_.

"Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches' dance upon
cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are
unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and
as such, can't be expected either to stand, or to understand, such a
dance of ideas. This is why I never print anything for the unwieldy
German intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of playful
idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions where such
productions do not usually arrive till they attain the evening of their
days, having previously exercised the right of transit through the
booksellers' shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a
retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces,
that is, other people's profiles; but most of the heads which sat or
stood to my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell
me the real truth of the matter; it's not altogether a matter of
indifference to me, because if I should turn out not to be quite 'all
there,' I should be incapable of devising my property by will, or of
exercising various civil functions.

"In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your
dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and
will you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the
rector of Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied
(incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world would take place
on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o'clock in the morning, and lived to die
in his own bed after all. I also send, for you and the 'Advertiser,' a
couple of programmes of Professor Lang's of this place, relative to the
General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank's of Pavia.
There is a very charming young lady, exceedingly clever and
intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is in the front rooms,
and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with me and my face,
I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are alike, the
only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things I
pride myself upon in ladies' society are my likeness to you and my
weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece
of your old uncle's with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up
at his expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of
the upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you,
entered in the way-bill as bridegroom's effects.

"The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own self,
I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get
back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in
Italy), and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a
degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth,
the houses and the hills of that place being so particularly charming.
And so, fare thee somewhat well."

They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the
Heimlicher's niece was being brought up could be none other than the
Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart--what was left of
it after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female
humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the
pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)--would be the marriage
torch to light her to her new home.

As there were three heavens in this letter--one for each of the
party--kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel,
the letter itself for Siebenkæs--I shouldn't have been astonished if
the terzetto of them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated
with delight--for the glad blood rose to his sober head--opened the
papers sent him upon the square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid
already), and hungrily began to devour his three printed "relishes
before supper," and literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without
even saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some supper
reminded him that he must be off. But before leaving, he petitioned
that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman and court of
arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the blending of
his oil with her water--he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old
one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his
recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have,
happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent
to the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). "It
shall be put on the stocks to-night," said Siebenkæs.

When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon
Lenette's finger didn't squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and
gave _himself_ credit for having been the means of filing it smoother
and padding it softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said--

"I shall always be delighted to come whenever there's the slightest
thing the matter with you two charming people."

Lenette answered, "Oh yes, do come very often."

And Siebenkæs added, "The oftener the better."

And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so
comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at
psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate
said very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason
was that he had Leibgeber's letter lying by his plate in the place
where the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend shone
bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty
darkness between--their first happy meeting to come floated magically
before him. Hope shot down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic
cave where he was panting and toiling now--and the coming spring stood
like some cathedral tower all hung with lamps lofty and bright in the
distance, beaming through the dark night sky.

At length he "came to himself," _i. e_. to his wife; the strong image
of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the
present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride's profile
up in the choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early
weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths
about him and draw him closer to the silent form by his side. "Well
darling, and how are you getting on?" he said, awaking from his reverie
and taking her hand, now that all was peace again between them. She
had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, habit at all events,
of being much quicker to show that she was vexed than that her anger
was over; of, at all events, being slow to show the latter; and of
commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very
moment that amends have been made and accepted, and pardon begged and
granted. There are very few married women indeed who will put their
hand into their husbands', and say "There, I'm good again," without a
very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are much more
ready to do it. Wendeline _did_ hold hers out, but did it too coldly,
and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth,
which she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this
smilingly--she gravely giving her whole attention to the process of
folding the long white parallelogram into exact squares--and at length,
when the last and thickest square was arrived at, he held it fast
there--she pulled, trying to look very serious--he looked at her very
fondly and tenderly--she couldn't help smiling at this and then he took
the tablecloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart,
and said, in her arms, "Little thief! how can you be so naughty to your
old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name may be?" And now
the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing
flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately---- But, my
dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the
first was said to signify.

The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to
ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel
might find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I
shall just trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste
in this place; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen
to be a painter's brush--or a painter's brush to be an engraver's
style--or an engraver's style a flower anther, generating generation
upon generation of lilies and roses.

The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new
pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette's shoulder fitted into
the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of
white paper was tacked on to the board--her pretty, soft head was
pressed on the stiff paper--he applied, with much care and self
restraint, his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it
was to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the reality--and
went slowly down the beautiful, flowery declivity all roses and lilies.
But little or nothing came of it; the _back_ part of the head was
pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work to the
sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.

"Wendeline, your head isn't still a moment," he said. And indeed her
face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened
beat of her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the
other hand, his pencil stumbled when it came to the delicate _basso
relievo_ of her little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and
stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips which he
couldn't draw, and which she always had either too much open or too
tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said, "See, haven't you
got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The Schulrath will think
you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here's where you
moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of the jump
is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a
half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning."

"Try once more, dear; I'll do just as you tell me; I should like it to
be very nice," Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and
steadied her soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband
gently glided his drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of
some white hemisphere--instead of breathing, he found she was _holding_
her breath this time till she shook again, and till the colour came to
her face.

And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments
of the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against
his heart.

"Ah!" (he thought) "can it be that she does really love him?" (_i. e._
the Schulrath).

His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her
chin as if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his
pencil made black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped
at the closed lips, which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning
prayers, had ever touched, and thought "Must _this_ come upon me too?
must _this_ joy be taken from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up
my bill of divorce and Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?" He
could do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly from
her shoulder--fell upon her closed lips--kissed away the pent-up
sigh--pressed the life out of his jealousy between his heart and hers,
and said--

"I can't do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don't be vexed, darling! Tell
me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don't you understand
me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?"

She answered quite innocently, "Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I
know, but I really have _not_ the slightest idea."

Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland,
and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair,
garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming,
icefields of the land of dreams--the magic shadowy background of the
noisy jarring, shifting day--our camera obscura full of moving
miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the
Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.

               END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK.

The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I
stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep,
and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in
the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden
here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall,
and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was
only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket
circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father
gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except
with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.

The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and
he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian
as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign
correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a
looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to
look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I
myself was. But the Captain--for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers
and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because
she was useful in the business--would let her speak to no man
whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So
that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas,
a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by
means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a
window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn't exactly everybody
who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (_i. e_. one her
father shouldn't hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his
organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should
close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked
into. I _did_ manage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of
a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my
pains.

The old man--who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time
I had remained the evening before--had this evening only _pretended_ to
be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity
with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the
beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I
ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been
ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as
sleeping powders.

The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the
two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end
of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it,
and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of
congratulation--"Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come
here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter's head with all sorts
of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till
she'll be of no more use in a shop than----"

"Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!" said I quite quietly, taking
him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; "just
listen to one single, _half_-word!"

I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, "Herr Pigtail--for in
Charles the Great's time every officer was so styled, because in those
days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now--Herr Pigtail, I'm
not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year's going
out and the new year's coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the
son of the ----,[32] and that I shall never see you more, though you
shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for
God's sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman
reads--one of whom will be her husband--and every tradesman's wife. Yet
for all this reading, there's still plenty of spinning and cooking
going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And
as for _corrupting_ her--why! that's just what a man who reads will
find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads,
and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me
entreat you, Captain."

"If you would but just mind your own affairs! What's the girl to
_you_?" was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on
neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year's, had
I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the
daughter's but about a groschen's worth of hair (and that not her own),
which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.

It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of
my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I
have said, I hadn't done it. I had said to myself, "Enjoy a pretty face
as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a
nightingale's, and don't touch the picture or throttle the bird. What!
must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into
camisoles?"

Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all
is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince.
That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so
soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I
should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter
kind.[33] "Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every
syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book;
but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given
her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be
asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the
history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs's troubles occur, and his
death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher
in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they
are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning
newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new
heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside
her own."

The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder
and louder: but I say no more about it--every additional word would
have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may
at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while
her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this
truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be
starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running
(I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers' children
get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are
all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob
Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses
mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been
habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with
yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight
are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as
pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the
name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own.
Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in
celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in
the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have
there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as
long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral
debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.

I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his
daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once,
so that it might not appear which was for which).

"Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more
shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my
biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the
holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he
who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send
thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a
poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the
future--bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante
causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days,
not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good
night."

It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn
hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything
but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more
new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were
giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and
miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me
more--particularly in an appropriate mouth--than your sapless, new
poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry
altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going
through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very
different kinds--for you see it was only eleven o'clock and the cold
night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I
didn't want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that
is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that
flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter
company.

Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye
can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he
will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his
own individuality--the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same
powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its
relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than
that which is what forgets--namely, the forgetter's _self_. Not only do
the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of
themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also,
renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own
Ego, and its position with respect to other entities--deafer and
blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of
contemplation (which we always _move away_ to a certain distance from
ourselves, and from the mind's eye, so as to bring the latter to bear
on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the
object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject
of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my
astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before--me so
to speak under my nose.

Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have
been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay,
and his own Ego into the bargain?

But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered
height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego
burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was
no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage--a
separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points
of time--stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence--new years'
days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the
waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks
about him, and says--"How the current has been carrying me along,
drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down
there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming
toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!"

Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one's Ego, there can be
no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of
the world.

I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was
all aglow--the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the
pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black
upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed
to be kneeling motionless on the ground.

And now 12 o'clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell,
with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming
after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, "Now has Destiny, with the
twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor
perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes."

The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see
him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.

I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to
where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather
prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the
beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep
traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons
had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn
a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.

I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened
by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to
hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm,
and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the
distant march of the approaching foe. "Shallow, timid soul," thought I,
"why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of
the clear, still night--thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why
strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come,
and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet
unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence,
no inscriptions yet--why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy
Solomon's ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who
dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind
which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to _be_ death
and the future itself."

In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to
the bier--ay, and ourselves as well--our old wounds burn anew, and our
hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like
arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some
great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the
whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the
_ignes fatui_ and glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and
frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his
tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little
crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth,
every new year's night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother
of many gods in us--and in such a night there begins for us a better
normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should
kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father
had knelt.

But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it
came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and
trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the
sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of
the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew
glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming
spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these
spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring
reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take
his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering
plumes, and hailed by skylarks' anthems, come and alight upon our
shores.

The distant new year's music flowed around me still I felt much
happier, and far more tender; I saw the _coming_ sorrows in the new
born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like
sorrows that are _past_, or like the music around me--just as the rain
which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in
the distance like music.

But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a
white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household
circle of one great family--and as the music, like lovelier sighs,
accompanied my thoughts--as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon
the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the
beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now--but the
great Beneficence spreads their _seed_ for evermore)--when I thought of
the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier
when they opened their eyes in the morning--and when I thought of
those awake UNDER me, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a
wish,--my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy
and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling
snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.

And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends,
and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new
year's wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely
_think_ my own--

"Oh! may you all be happy _all_ the years of your lives."

                             END OF BOOK I.

            PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH BOOKS.

It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every
preface I write I am obliged to append a book--like the endorsement on
a bill of exchange--or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who
dabbles in authorship by way of amusement has his books sent to him all
ready written and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he
has to do is to attach his gold frontlets of prefaces to their
foreheads--which is nothing but painting the _corona_ about the sun. As
yet, however, not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a
book, although for several years I have had a considerable number of
prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going at great bargains), in
which I extol to the best of my ability works which have not as yet
come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect museum of these prize
medals and commemoration medals of other people's cleverness at the
service of anyone who may stand in need of them; they are all made by
the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collection of them is
increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell it off
wholesale before very long (I don't see what else I can do), and bring
out a book--consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.

They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair,
and authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of
preludes forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves
whichever preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the
Easter fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes
out (and it will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary
world will only be beglorified in _corpore_, in _coro_, and I shall be
(so to speak) making a present of a patent of nobility to the republic
of letters in the lump,--as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the whole
mercantile community of Vienna; although I have before my eyes (in the
shape of the poor reviewers who work themselves well nigh to death,
hammering and building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal
arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to extol the
republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get less for it
than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as many
lines--for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of
a hundred five-dollar pieces.

I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this
place by way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated
author had written it to order for this book (which is the actual
truth, moreover). There is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into
two characters, the flower painter and the preface maker. But,--as one
cannot _quite_ lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty--I carefully
pick out the most miserable specimen of the lot, one in which laudation
occurs but to a very moderate extent, one which places the author of
the book attached to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a
triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover; whereas
the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the reading public
are, by _them_, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the Elijah's chariot,
of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.

In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author
of 'HESPERUS' has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces,
and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well
worthy of perusal.

                 PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF 'HESPERUS.'

The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of
postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.

Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit,
which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every
person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham
DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none
looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal
mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed
with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own
_im_mortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.

The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in
fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither
may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries' breeding cages have to
be more roomy than their singing cages.

If this be so, then, what does the author's pen do? Like a child's, it
traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the
reader with pencil.

The author's strings only vibrate in unison with the reader's octaves,
fifths, fourths, and thirds--not with his seconds or sevenths.
Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the
cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author's level or pass
beyond it.

And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of
Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of
attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet's grapes as
though they were real ones, thinking the _boy_ a painted one, when we
really ought to be frightened at _him_.

The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident
matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of
antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according
to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which
will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I
leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all
gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much
crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the
Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support
of the proposition)--relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the
Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we
must continue to worship what remains--that is to say, the worms which
have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the
time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms
are quite equal to one dragon.

This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to
have any sense in it which is,--that no man is wholly indifferent to,
and unaffected by, _every_ kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to
poetical _reflections_ (illusions) that he swears allegiance--inasmuch
as he does even _that_ he thereby does homage to truth; for in all
poetry it is but the part which is _true_ which goes to the heart (or
head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing but the Moral
produces effect. A reflection which should be nothing whatever _but_ a
reflection would necessarily, for that very reason, not _be_ a
reflection. Every _semblance_ (meaning every thing which we _see_, or
suppose we _see_) presupposes the existence of _light_ somewhere, and
_is_ itself light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only,
most people in our, not so much _enlightened_ as _enlightening_ times,
are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of
day, but, in the night, fly to every _nocturnal_ light, every
phosphorescent surface.

The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and
flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such
levellings and flattenings--ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well
as blood (which are what the three grand trees of this world--the trees
of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty--are watered with) have been shed,
but never counted. History, in painting the human race, does not follow
the example of that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king,
drew only his seeing profile; what history paints is the blind side,
and it needs some grand calamity to bring great men to light--as comets
are seen during total eclipses of the sun. Not upon the battle-field
only--upon the holy ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of
truth--the pedestal whereon history raises on high some _single_ hero
whose name rings in all men's ears has to be composed and built
up of thousands of _other_ heroes who have fought and fallen, nameless
and unknown. The noblest deeds of heroism are done within four walls,
not before the public gaze,--and as history keeps record only of the
_men_ sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in spilt blood,
doubtless our annals are grander and more beautiful in the eyes
of the all-pervading spirit of the universe than in those of the
history-writer; the great scenes of history are estimated according to
the numbers of angels or devils on the stage, the _men_ not being taken
into account.

These are the grounds on which I rely when I assert with a good deal of
boldness that when we inhale the perfume of the full-blown blossoms of
joy with too deep and strong an inhalation, without having first given
them a good shake, we run the risk of snuffing up some tormenting
insect (before we know what we are about) through the ethmoid into the
brain;[34] and _who_--tell me if you can--is to get it out again?
Whereas little or nothing of a risky sort can be snuffed up out of
_Flower-pieces_, and their painted calices, since painted worms remain
where they are.

This, then, is what _I_ have to postulate by means of similes. What the
_public_ postulates, or demands, is my opinion of these Flower-pieces.
The author is a promising youth of five years of age;[35] he and I have
been friends since childhood, and, I think, can assert that we have but
one soul between us, as Aristotle says should be the case with friends.
He gets me to read over everything he thinks of publishing, and to give
him my opinion and advice. And, as I returned these Flower-pieces to
him with the warmest (and, at the same time, sincerest) expression of
my approval, he has requested me to make my verdict somewhat more
widely known, believing as he does (rather too flatteringly perhaps)
that it may carry a certain amount of weight with it, more especially
as it is an impartial verdict, and, as such, one which can be placed in
the hands of the critics as a species of ruler wherewith to draw the
lines upon which _their_ verdicts may be written.

In this, however, he goes a little too far. All I can say is that the
work is written quite as if I had done it myself. There is no greater
amount of dynamic ornamentation in it than is usual in books, and,
happy as the author would have been to have thundered, stormed, and
poured in it, there was of course no room in a parish advocate's
lodgings for Rhine cataracts, thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes (of
tropes) or waterspouts, and he has had to reserve his more terrific
tornadoes for a future work. I have his permission to mention the name
of this future work; it is the 'Titan.' In this work he means to be an
absolute Hecla, and shatter the ice of his country (and himself into
the bargain) to pieces; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he will spout
up a column of boiling water four feet in diameter to a height of
eighty-nine or ninety feet in the air, and that at such a temperature
that when this wet fire pillar falls down again and flows into the book
shops, it will still be warm enough to boil eggs hard or their mother
soft. "Then" (he always says--very sadly however--because he sees what
a hard matter it is to distinguish between full half of our battling
and harrying here below and a Jack Pudding farce and piece of utter
buffoonery and nonsense,--also, that the cradle of this life _rocks_
us, and _stills_ us indeed, but carries us not a step on our
way)--"then may the _Arbor Toxicaria Macassariensis_[36] of the Ideal,
beneath which I have lost a little hair already, go on poisoning me,
and dispatch me to the Land of the Ideal. At all events, I have knelt
down and prayed under the solemnising soul-elevating sighing roar of
its death-dealing branches. And why should there be a hut made ready
for the traveller beside the eternal well of truth, marked with the
title 'Travellers' REST,' if no one ever enters it?" He wants, by way
of broad "flies" for his life stage on earth, merely a regular,
downright, _rainy year_ or two (two will suffice); for a broad, bright,
open sky overpowers us, and weakens the hand's pen power by making the
eyes over full. And here the book-maker differs markedly from his
provision-contractor, the papermaker, who shuts _his_ mill up precisely
when the weather is _wet_.

I should also be glad if readers would have the goodness to go once
more through the few chapters composing the first book--that they may
see what they really lack; and indeed a book which is not worth reading
twice is not worth reading once.

In conclusion, I (albeit the most inconsiderable clubbist and
vote-possessor of all the public) would fain incite the author to the
production of other seedlings, suckers, and infantas of the same stamp,
trusting that the reading world may form its opinion on his work with
the same careful favour and indulgent approval as I have formed mine.

                                            JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

   Hof in Voigtland,
    _June 5th_, 1796.

                           *   *   *   *   *

Thus far my friend's preface. Utterly absurd as it is, my own preface,
you see, has got to be concluded too, and at the end of it I can but
sign myself as my aforesaid man Friday and namesake does, videlicet,

                                            JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

   Hof in Voigtland,
    _June 5th_, 1796.

                                BOOK II.

                               CHAPTER V.

   THE BROOM AND THE BESOM AS PASSION IMPLEMENTS--THE IMPORTANCE OF A
     BOOKWRITER--DIPLOMATIC NEGOTIATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS ON THE SUBJECT
     OF CANDLE SNUFFING--THE PEWTER CUPBOARD--DOMESTIC HARDSHIPS AND
     ENJOYMENTS.

Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the life of
Christ--five of Joy, five of Woe, five of Glory. I have carefully
accompanied our hero through the five joyful mysteries of which the
Linden honey-month of his marriage has had to tell. I now come with him
to the five mysteries of Woe with which the series of the mysteries of
most marriages is--concluded. I trust, however, that his may yet be
found to contain the five of Glory also.

In my first edition, I began this book of my hero's story in an
unconcerned manner, with the above sentence just as if it were
literally correct. A second, and carefully revised edition, however,
renders it incumbent upon me to add, as an emendation, that the fifteen
mysteries in question do not come one after another, like steps of
stairs, or ancestors in a pedigree, but are shuffled up together like
good and bad cards in a hand. Yet, in spite of this shuffling, the joy
outbalances the sorrow, at any rate in its duration, as has been the
case, indeed, with this terrestrial globe, our planet itself, which has
survived several last days, and as a consequence still more springs,
that is to say, re-creations on a smaller scale. I mention all this to
save a number of poor devils of readers from the dreadful thought that
they have got to wade through a whole "Book II." full of tears, partly
to be read about, partly to be shed out of compassion. I am not one of
those authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and gaze upon
thousands of charmed people running up and down, a prey to every kind
of agitation, suspense, and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon
them and swallow them up.

When Siebenkæs awoke in the morning, he at once packed the devil of
jealousy, the marriage devil, off to the place where all other devils
dwell. For a calming sleep lowers the pulse of the soul's fever--the
grains thereof are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also for
the hot fever of love. Indeed he put down the tracing board, and with a
pantograph made a correct, reduced copy of his yesterday's free
translation of the Engelkrautian countenance, and blackened it nicely.
When it was done, he said to his wife, for very love of her, "We'll
send him the profile this morning, at once. It may be a good long while
before he comes to fetch it." "Oh yes! he won't be here till Wednesday,
and by that time he'll have forgotten all about it." "But I could bring
him here sooner than that," Siebenkæs answered; "I need only send him
the Russian Trinity dollar of 1679 to get changed for me; he won't
_send_ me a farthing of the money he'll bring it himself as he always
has done all through Leibgeber's collection." "Or you might send him
the dollar and the picture both," said Lenette, "he would like it
better." "Which would he like better?" he asked. She didn't see exactly
what answer to make to this ridiculous question (whether she meant the
stamped face or the pictured one) sprung upon her like a mine in this
sort of way, and got out of her difficulty by saying, "Well, _the
things_, of course." He spared her any further catechising.

The Schulrath, however, sent nothing but an answer to the effect that
he was beside himself with delight at the charming presents, and would
come to express his thanks in person, and to settle up with the
advocate, by the end of the following week at latest. The little dash
of bitter flavour which was perceptible to the taste in this unexpected
answer of the too happy Schulrath, was by no means sweetened away by
the arrival at this moment of the messenger of the Inheritance Office,
with Heimlicher von Blaise's first proceedings in the matter of the
plaint lodged against him, consisting of a petition for three weeks'
grace within which to lodge answers, a delay which the Court had
readily accorded. Siebenkæs, as his own poor's advocate, lived in the
sure and certain hope that the promised land of inheritance, flowing
with milk and honey, would be reached by his children, though _he_
would in all probability have long ere that time perched in the
wilderness of the law; for justice is given to recompensing the
children, and the children's children, for the uprightness of the
fathers, and for the goodness of their cause. It was more or less in
convenient, at the same time, to have nothing to live upon during one's
own lifetime. The Russian Trinity dollar--for which the Schulrath
hadn't even paid as yet--couldn't be lived upon, and there were but one
or two queue ducats remaining of the treasury chest provided by
Leibgeber, for the carrying on of operations against the Heimlicher.
This gold coin and those few silver ones were (although I have said
nothing about it till now) the entire money contents remaining in the
Leibgeberian saviour's scrip, and indeed none but a true disciple and
follower of the Saviour could be expected to hold out upon them. My
silence on this matter of the emptying of the coin cabinet may perhaps
be accepted in evidence of the fact that I try as much as I can to
avoid mentioning anything calculated to give my readers pain.

"Oh! I shall get on somehow or other," said Siebenkæs quite gleefully,
as he set to work harder than ever at his writing, with the view of
getting a considerable haul of money into the house, at the earliest
moment possible, in the shape of payment for his 'Selection from the
Devil's Papers.'

But there was a fresh purgatorial fire now being stoked and blown, till
it blazed hotter and hotter about him. I have refrained from saying
anything about the fire in question till now, though he has been
sitting roasting at it since the day before yesterday, Lenette being
the cook, and his writing table the larkspit.

During the few days when the wordless quarrel was going on, he had got
into a habit of listening with the closest attention to what Lenette
was doing, as he sat writing away at his 'Selection from the Devil's
Papers'; and this sent his ideas all astray. The softest step, the very
slightest shake of anything affected him just as if he had had
hydrophobia, or the gout, and put one or two fine young ideas to death,
as a louder noise kills young canaries, or silkworms.

He controlled himself very well at first. He pointed out to himself
that his wife really could _not_ help moving about, and that as long as
she hadn't a spiritual or glorified body and furniture to deal with,
she couldn't possibly go about as silently as a sunbeam, or as her
invisible good and evil angels behind her. But while he was listening
to this _cours de morale_, this _collegium pietatis_ of his own, he
lost the run of his satirical conceits and contexts, and his language
was deprived of a good deal of its sparkle.

But the morning after the silhouette evening, when their hearts had
shaken hands and renewed the old royal alliance of Love, he could go
much more openly to work, and so, as soon as he had blackened
the profile, and had only his own original creations to go on
blackening--_i. e_. when he was going to begin working in his own
charcoal burning hut, he said to his wife, as a preliminary--

"If you can help it, Lenette, don't make very much noise to-day. I
really can hardly get on with my writing, if you do--you know it's for
publication."

She said "I'm sure you can't hear me--I go about so very quietly."

Although a man may be long past the years of his youthful follies, yet
in every year of his life there crop up a few weeks and days in which
he has fresh follies to commit. It was truly in a moment of one of
these days that Siebenkæs made the request above mentioned; for he had
now laid upon himself the necessity of lying in wait and watching to
see what Lenette would do in consequence of it. She skimmed over the
floor, and athwart the various webs of her household labours, with the
tread of a spider. Like her sex in general, she had disputed his little
point, merely for the sake of disputing it, not of doing what she was
asked not to do. Siebenkæs had to keep his ears very much on the alert
to hear what little noise she did make, either with her hands or her
feet--but he was successful, and did hear the greater part of it.
Unless when we are asleep we are more attentive to a slight noise than
to a loud one; and our author listened to her wherever she went, his
ear and his attention going about fixed to her like a pedometer
wherever she moved. In short he had to break off in the middle of the
satire, called "The Nobleman with the Ague," and jump up and cry to her
(as she went creeping about), "For one whole hour have I been listening
and watching that dreadful tripping about on tiptoe. I had much rather
you would stamp about in a pair of the iron-soled sandals people used
to wear for beating time in.[37] Please go about as you usually do,
darling."

She complied, and went about _almost_ as she usually did. He would have
very much liked to have prohibited the intermediate style of walking,
as he had the light and the heavy; but a husband doesn't care to
contradict himself twice in one morning; once is enough. In the evening
he asked her if she would mind going about the house in her stockings
when he was at work at his writing. She would find it nice and cool for
the feet. "In fact," he added, "as I'm working all the forenoon
literally for our bread, it would be well if you would do nothing that
isn't absolutely necessary while I am at my literary work."

Next morning he sat in judgment (mentally) upon everything that went on
behind his back, and challenged it to see if it could produce the
free-pass of necessity--going on with his writing all the time, but
doing it worse than usual. This scribbling martyr endured a great many
things with as much patience as he could muster, but when Wendeline
took to whisking the straw under the green painted marriage TORUS with
a long broom, the cross grew too heavy for his shoulder. It happened,
moreover, that he had been reading two days before in an old Ephemeris
of scientific inquirers, that a clergyman, of the name of Johann
Pechmann, couldn't bear the sound of a besom--that it nearly took his
breath away, and that he once took to his heels and bolted when a
crossing sweeper accidentally ran against him. The effect of his having
read this was, that he was involuntarily more observant and intolerant
of a cognate discomfort. He called out to the domestic sweeper in the
next room, from his chair where he sat--

"Lenette, do _not_ go on scrubbing and switching about with that besom
of yours, it drives away the whole of my best ideas out of my head.
There was an old clergyman once of the name of Pechmann, who would
rather have been condemned to sweep a crossing in Vienna himself, than
to listen to another sweeping it--he would rather have been flogged
with a birch-broom, than have heard the infernal sound of it swishing
and whishing. How is a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the
printer and publisher, into his head with all this sweeping and
scrubbing going on?"

Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she
left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and
merely whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the
hair-broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did
with his writing. However the editor of the 'Devil's Papers' managed to
hear it, in a manner beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the
bedroom door and called in at the room, "My darling, it's every bit as
hellish a torment to me if I can hear it _at all_. You may fan those
miserable sweepings with a peacock's feather, or a holy-water asperger,
or you may puff them away with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor
book must suffer and pay the piper all the same."

"I'm quite done now, at all events," she said.

He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads of his fourth
satire, "Concerning the five Monsters and their receptacles, whereon I
at first intended to subsist."

Meanwhile Lenette gently closed the door, so that he was driven to the
conclusion that there was something or other going on to annoy him
again in his Gehenna and place of penitence. He laid down his pen and
cried--

"Lenette, I can't hear very distinctly what it is--but you're up to
something or other in there that I can _not_ stand. For God's dear
sake, stop it at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of
Werther, for this one day--come here, let me see you."

She answered, all out of breath with hard work--

"I'm not doing anything."

He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his
wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green
rails of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox
in a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be
aware that a green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a
magnified canaries' breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or
portcullises, and that this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though
less handsome in appearance, much better for health than our heavy
bastille towers all hung about with curtains which keep away every
breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed about half a pint of
bedroom air, and said, in measured accents--

"You're at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know
quite well that I'm sitting there working like a slave for you and
myself too, and that I've been writing away for the last hour with
scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all
your cartridges at one shot, for God's sake, and don't finish me off
altogether with that rag of yours."

Lenette, full of astonishment said, "It's simply impossible, old man.
that you can hear me in the next room"--and polished away harder than
ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said
in a louder tone, "Come, get up!--It's exactly that which I complain
of, that I _can't_ hear you in the next room; I'm obliged to rack my
brains to guess what you're at--and the only ideas left in my head are
connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant
notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven
away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit and work away here
more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and
canister, howitzer shells, and hundred-pounders that you were banging
away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that
I really can _not_ stand, is a _quiet_ noise."

All this talk having put him a little out of temper, he fetched her out
of the room, rag and all, saying--

"It does seem a little hard that, while I'm labouring away here with
all my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little
entertainment for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should
be started in my own room, and that an author's very bed should be
turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-balls sent about his
ears out of it. There, I shan't be writing while we're at dinner, I'll
talk the thing out at full length with you then."

At noon, then,[38] as he was about to enter on the subject of the
morning's tourney, he had first to hold a prayer-tourney. I mean this:
"prayers" do not, in Nürnberg and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain
hereditary office and service of mass in a court chapel, but--the
ringing of the twelve o'clock bell. Now the dining-table of our couple
stood against the wall, and was not put in the middle of the floor
except for meals. Well, Siebenkæs never succeeded above twice during
his married life in having this table brought forward BEFORE the soup
came in (for if a woman ONCE forgets a thing, she goes on forgetting it
a thousand times running[39]), though he preached his lungs as dry as a
fox's (which are used for curing ours); both soup and table were always
moved together, after the soup came in, without the spilling of a
greater quantity of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a
pill.

To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkæs slowly chewed the pill
which he swallowed with the soup. The delay in moving the table he
observed anxiously (as if it had been a delay in the arrival of
an equinox), with a long face and slow breathing, and when the
soup-libation was duly poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a
calm tone of voice, however--

"The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At sea, you know,
people spill their soup because their vessel rolls and pitches--and
ours is spilt for a similar reason. See here, the dinner-table
and the morning besom are both in a tale together; they are two
conspirators who will blow out your husband's candle--to use a strong
expression--before they have done."

This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way of hymn, by the
arrival of the town fool of Kuhschnappel, who brought in a great sheet
of paper containing an invitation to the shooting match on St. Andrew's
Day, the 30th of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have
gathered from what has already been said that the only money left in
the house was the queue-ducat. At the same time, Siebenkæs couldn't
leave the shooting-club, without thereby granting to himself a
certificate of poverty, a _testimonium paupertatis_, in the face of the
whole town. And really a shooting-ticket for this match was almost as
good as mining shares or East India stock to a man who was as good a
shot as Siebenkæs. It would also give him an opportunity of doing that
public honour to his wife which she, as a senate clerk's daughter from
Augspurg, had a right to expect. Unfortunately, however, the grave man
of folly couldn't be got to give change for the curious queue-ducat,
particularly as Siebenkæs aroused his suspicions with respect to it
himself, by saying. "This is a very good tail or queue-ducat, I assure
you. I don't wear a tail myself," he added, "but that's no reason why a
ducat shouldn't, if the King of Prussia chooses to immortalise his own
by having it stamped upon it. Wife, would you get our landlord, the
hairdresser, to come up; nobody can know better than he whether it's a
queue-ducat or not, seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands
every day." The pickle-herring of Kuhschnappel didn't vouchsafe the
ghost of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, and declared it to be a
queue, and civilly took it away himself to get it changed. Hairdressers
can run; in five minutes he brought the change for the ducat.

When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion of it, Lenette's
face was all over double interjections and marks of interrogation;
wherefore Siebenkæs resumed his midday sermon. "The principal prizes,"
he said, "are pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and
mostly provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I suspect that you
and I shall dine on St. Andrew's Day upon a nice piece of roast meat in
a new dish, both of which I shall have shot into your kitchen, if I
only take a little pains. And at all events don't worry yourself,
darling, because our money's nearly all gone. Take refuge behind me. I
am your sandbag, your gabion, your shelter trench, and with my rifle,
more certainly still with my pen, I feel pretty sure I shall keep the
devil of poverty at his distance, till my precious guardian hands over
my mother's property. Only for God's sake don't let _your_ work
interrupt _mine_. Your rag and your besom have cost me at least sixteen
currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight imperial
dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers (counting the imperial
dollar at ninety kreuzer)--and I ought, to get more--I should have
earned forty-eight currency dollars this morning if I had written a
(printed) sheet and a half. But you see I had to stop in the middle of
it and expend a great many words upon you, for none of which I get a
single kreuzer. You should look upon me as a fat old spider stowed away
in a box to shrivel up in time into a precious gold nugget or jewel.
Whenever I take a dip of ink I draw a thread of gold out of the ink
bottle, as I've often told you, and (as the proverb says) the morning
hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund). Go on
with your dinner, and listen. I'll just take this opportunity of
explaining to you the principal points in which the preciousness of an
author consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. In
Swabia, in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in which there are
people who appraise authors as our master butcher here does beef. They
are usually known by the name of tasters or rulers of taste, because
they try the flavour of every book as it comes out, and then tell the
people whether they'll like it or not. We authors in our irritation
often call these people critics, but they might bring an action against
us for libel for so doing. Now as these directors of taste seldom write
books themselves, they have all the more time to read and find fault
with other people's. Yet it does sometimes happen that some of them
have written bad books themselves, and consequently know a bad book in
a moment when they come across one. Many become patron saints of
authors and of their books for the same reason that St. John Nepomuck
became the patron saint of bridges and those who cross them; because he
was once thrown off one into the water. Now these scribblings of mine
will be sent to these gentlemen as soon as they are in print (as your
hymn-book is). And they'll peer all through my productions to see
whether or not I've written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too
large or too small), whether I've put any wrong letters, a little e for
a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too long
or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give
opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do
with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with
besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense,
and it'll all be printed. Of course that's a terrible thing to happen
to a man, for these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in
the paper however fine it is, with nails as long as fingers
(buttonmakers' nails are shorter, but not circumcisers' among the
Jews), before they give it a name to carry about with it, as the
circumcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a slip
of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad
name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia
in so many plain words that I'm an ass. May the devil confound their
impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of
yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and
legibly, and with proper attention and ability--and every sheet of my
Devilish Papers is so written--if I carefully weigh and consider every
word and every page before I write it, if I am playful in one place,
instructive in another, pleasing in all,--in that case I am bound to
tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who are quite capable of
appreciating work of that sort, and would think nothing of sitting down
and circulating papers in which the least they would say of me would be
that I had certainly brought something away from college in my head,
and had a little to show for my studies. In short, they would say, they
hadn't expected it of me, and there was really something _in me_. Now a
panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his
wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking 'Where does he live,
this Siebenkæs whom everybody's talking of?' there are sure to be lots
of folks in the Fuggery to answer, 'Oh! he lives in Kuhschnappel, his
wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good
wife she is to him.'"

"You've told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times," she
answered. "And it's just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure
_he_ has all the best books through his hands, binding them."

This allusion to his repetitions of himself, though not meant
ill-temperedly, he didn't very much relish. In fact, the habit had
hitherto been, as it were, incubating unperceived in him, as a fever
does in its early stage. Husbands, even those who are sage and of few
words, talk to their wives with the same boundless liberty and
unrestraint as they do to their own selves; and a man repeats himself
_to_ himself immeasurably oftener than to anybody else, and that
without so much as observing that he does it, let alone taking any
count of how often. The wife, however, both observes and counts;
accustomed as she is to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible)
remarks from her husband's lips daily, she can't help remembering them
when they occur again.

The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a fleeting cloud with
him. He said he had been to all the poor devils in the house to see if
he could get as much of the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as
would pay his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were a
set of church mice and he hadn't succeeded. The whole garrison of them
were naturally unequal to the payment of an impost of this description
six whole weeks before it was due, inasmuch as the majority of them
didn't see how they were to pay it when it _was_ due. So the Saxon came
to the grandee of his house, to the "Lord of Ducats" as he styled the
advocate. Siebenkæs couldn't find in his heart to disappoint the
patient soul with another "no" on the top of those he had borne so
good-humouredly; his wife and he scraped together the little small
change they had left out of the ducat, and sent him away rejoicing with
half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left for themselves
was--the question what they should do for light in the evening; for
there weren't even a couple of groschen in the house to get half a
pound of candles, and there were no candles _in natura_.

I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to
rave. Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of
stoicism for only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and
frozen, like a woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age
which has had all its strongest sinews cut through except the universal
one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, against riches, is
nobler and more useful than the most accurately just depreciation of
poverty. For pasquinades on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich,
reminding them that though their riches may take to themselves wings,
true happiness does not depend thereon; while the poor derive from them
not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter satisfaction of
conquering the same. All that is base in man--thoughts, fancies, what
we look on as being examples--all join in one chorus in praise of gold;
why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve force, her
_chevaliers d'honneur_, philosophy and beggars' pride?

The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and
then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and
with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three
pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand
by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of
shame, "Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?"

"I'm only going to turn them into silver," he said; "as kings make
church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin.
There's nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table
ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of
Brunswick turned a king's silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a
plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs have taken many an
apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others
as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends,
sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world
in that analysed form."

"Ah! stupid nonsense," she answered.

Some few readers will probably say "What else was it?" and I ought long
ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so
incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.

He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his
wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even
when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the
farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice,
and of his liking to hear himself do it. "Women," he would repeat,
"have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and
therefore don't waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise
signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might
be better employed." This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for
Reinhold's 'Lexicon to Jean Paul's Levana,' nor for me personally
either, in some senses.

"Ah! stuff and nonsense" had been Lenette's answer. Firmian merely
asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk
the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his
reasons before a woman's skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly
blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse
he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best
answer he could have made. He said, "It was an angel that put it in my
head; because on St. Andrew's Day I shall regain everything that I turn
into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall
keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the
rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I assure
you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes."

What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and
expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old
Sabel's basket--and she was celebrated all over the town for
transacting this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with
as discreet a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. "Nobody
gets it out of _me_," she would say, "whose the things are. The
treasurer, who's dead and gone poor man--you know I sold everything he
had in the world for him--he often used to say there was never the
equal of me."

But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[40] or "Descent of
the Saviour into Hades" is but little likely to help you long, in that
antechamber of hell which you've got into. The flames are gone from
about you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you,
but tomorrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be
blazing at your hearts! However, I don't want to put any restrictions
upon your trade in tin. We're quite right to have a good dinner to-day
though we know perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry
to-morrow again.

So the next morning Siebenkæs begged that he might be allowed to be all
the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the
day before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and
scouring-mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare
had much of the weight of a confessor's certificate, would sooner have
let go her hold of everything in the world--her husband included--than
of the duster and the besom. She thought this was merely _his_
obstinate persistency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the
organ bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops right
behind her author's back during the morning hours, whose mouths had two
kinds of gold in them for _him_, namely gold from the golden age, and
ordinary metallic gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet
stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn't to be
got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most heterogeneous
compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have ever met
with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris for
her husband's sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she
can deny herself to almost any extent for others' good, but not one bit
for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick
person, but not one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself
a better night's sleep in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor
butterflies, though neither of them possess stomachs, can eat less than
a woman going to a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her
guests; but if it's only her doctor and her own health that forbid her
some Esau's mess or other, she eats it that instant. Now men's
sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.

Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was asked to do and
what she wanted to do, tried to find the feminine line of the
resultant, and hit upon the middle course of stopping her scouring and
sweeping as long as he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he
got up, and went to the piano for a couple of minutes, or to the
window, or across the doorstep, that instant back she would bring her
washing and scrubbing instruments of torture into the room again.
Siebenkæs wasn't long in becoming cognisant of this terrible
alternation and relieving-of-the-guard between her besom and his
(satirical) one; and the way she watched and lay in wait for his
movements drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. At first
he bore it with really very great patience, as great as ever a husband
has, patience, that is, which lasts for a short time. But after
reflecting for a considerable period in silence, that the public, as
well as he, were sufferers by this room-cleaning business, and that all
posterity was, in a manner, watching and hanging upon every stroke of
that besom, which might do its work just as well in the afternoon when
he would only be at his law papers--the tumour of his anger suddenly
broke, and he grew mad, _i. e_. madder than he was before, and ran up
to her and cried--

"Oh! this is the very devil! At it again, eh! I see what you're about.
You watch till I get up from the table! Just be kind enough to finish
me off at once; hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or
not. Good God! It's a thing I really can _not_ comprehend. She sees as
well as possible that my book is our larder--that there are whole
rations of bread in every page of it--yet she holds my hands the entire
morning, so that I can't do a line of it. Here I've been sitting on the
nest all this time and only hatched as far as letter E, where I
describe the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh! Lenette! Lenette!"

"Very well," said Lenette, "it's all the same whatever I do, it's sure
to be wrong; do let me tidy the house properly, like any other woman."

And she asked him, in a simple manner, why it was that the bookbinder's
little boy (the language is mine, not hers), who played fantasias the
whole day long upon a child's toy fiddle, composing and enjoying whole
Alexander's Feasts upon it, didn't disturb him with his screeching
_un_harmonical progressions--and how he bore the chimneysweep's
sweeping the other day so much better than he did her sweeping of the
room. And as he couldn't quite manage to condense, just in a moment,
into few words the demonstration of the magnitude of the difference
which existed between these things, he found it better to get into a
rage again, and say--

"Do you suppose I'm going to make a great long speech and explanation
gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my work? _Himmel_! _Kreuz_!
_Wetter_! The municipal code, the Roman pandects, forbid a coppersmith
even to enter a street where a professor is working, and here's my own
wife harder than an old jurist--and not only that--she's the
coppersmith herself. I'll tell you what it is, Lenette, I shall really
speak to the Schulrath about this." This did a great deal of service.

The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before the Schulrath; a
piece of polite attention which no one would have expected from a man
of so much learning and knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as
much delighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at the
fact that she was a perfect angel all the afternoon; her hands made no
more noise at their work than her fingers or her needle; she even put
off the doing of several things which were not necessary. She
accompanied a sister in the oratorical art, who came in with a divine
bonnet (in her hands, to be altered), all the way down stairs, not so
much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all the points of
principal importance connected with the doing up of the bonnet, which
had already been settled, might be gone over again two or three times
out of the advocate's hearing.

This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak and tender
spot in him, his heart. He sought long in himself for a fitting
thank-offering in return, till he at last hit upon quite a new sort of
one.

"Listen, child," he said, taking her hand very affectionately;
"wouldn't it be more reasonable in me if I were to amuse myself with my
writing in the _evening_? I mean, if the husband were to do his
creating at a time when the wife had no washing to do. Just think what
a life of nectar and ambrosia that would be; we should sit opposite to
each other with a candle between us--you at your sewing, I at my
writing--the other people in the house would all have their work done
and be at their beer--of course there wouldn't be customers with
bonnets coming at that time of night to make themselves visible and
audible. The evenings will be getting longer too, and of course I shall
have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say nothing about
that now. What do you think, or what do you _say_ (if you like the
expression better), to this new style of life? Remember too, that we're
quite rich again now--the Russian Trinity dollar is like so much found
money."

"Oh! it will be delightful," she said, "I shall be able to do all my
household work in the morning, as a proper reasonable housekeeper
should."

"Yes, just so," he answered, "I shall write away quietly at my satires
all morning, then wait till evening, and go on where I left off."

The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and was quite without
a rival among all evenings that had gone before it. A young married
couple, sitting one on each side of a table, working away quietly at
their work, with a candle between them, have a considerable notion what
happiness is. He was all happy thoughts and kisses; she all smiles, and
what little noise she made with the frying-pan seemed no louder to him
than what she made with her needle. "When people are earning double
working-pay by the light of one candle," he said, greatly delighted at
the domestic reformation, "they needn't, as far as I see, restrict
themselves to a miserable dip, the thickness of a worm, which they can
see nothing by, unless it be the wretchedness of its own light.
To-morrow we'll set up a mould candle, and no more about it."

As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narration in this
story such events only as are of universal interest, it will be
sufficient cursorily to mention that the mould candle duly appeared
next evening, and kindled a feeble strife, because, _apropos_ of this
candle, the advocate once more brought forward a new theory of his,
concerning the lighting of candles. He held the somewhat schismatic
opinion that the rational way of lighting all candles, more
particularly thick ones, was to light them at the thick end, and not at
the top or thin end; and that this was the reason of there being two
wicks projecting from every candle. "A law of combustion," he would
add, "in support of which I need only refer (at least for women of
sense) to the self-evident truth that, when a candle is burning down,
it keeps growing larger and larger at its lower extremity--just as
people who are burning down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs,
with fat and dropsy. If we light the candle at the top, we find the
result to be a useless lump, plug, or stump of tallow running all over
our candlestick. Whereas, if we light it at the bottom, the liquefied
grease from the thick end wraps itself gradually and with the most
exquisite symmetry all over the thinner end as if feeding it, and
equalising its proportions."

In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced Shaftesbury's
touchstone of truth, ridicule. "Why, everybody that came in of an
evening, and noticed that I had put my candle upside down in the
candlestick, would burst out laughing; and it would be the wife that
everybody would blame." So that a mutual treaty of peace had to put a
period to this battle of the candle, to the effect that he should light
his candle at the bottom, and she hers at the top. And for the present,
as the candle common to both parties happened to be thick at the top,
he agreed to admit, without objection, the erroneous method of
lighting.

However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of
peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkæs
chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the
younger Pliny's wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see
to write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so
swimmingly with his selection from the said Devil's Papers, it would be
a splendid arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette
would snuff the candle always instead of his doing it himself.

"Of course," said she, "I shall be delighted." The first fifteen or
twenty minutes passed, and everything seemed to be all right.

The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin towards the
candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched
the snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying
anything however; and a little while after that, he moved the
candlestick a little bit, and said softly, "The candle." Matters now
began to assume a more serious aspect; he began to observe and watch
with greater attention the gradual obscuration of his paper, and
consequently the very snuffers which, in Lenette's hands, had promised
to throw so much light on his labours, became the means of impeding his
progress quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle
with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, "snuff" and "snuffers," took
bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a sprightly pertness up and
down on every letter of his most biting satires. "Lenette," he had soon
to say again, "please to amputate that stupid black stump there, on
both our accounts."

"Dear me, have I been forgetting it?" she said, and snuffed it in a
great hurry.

Readers of a historical turn--such as I should wish mine to be--can now
see that things couldn't but get worse and worse, and more and more out
of joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length,
waiting till some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from
the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out with the word "Snuff!"
Then he took to varying his verbs, saying, "Enlighten!" or "Behead!" or
"Nip-off." Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using
other forms of speech, such as "The candle's cap, Capmaker;" "There's a
long spot in the sun again;" or, "This is a charming _chiaroscuro_,
well adapted for night thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but
snuff away all the same."

At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in the flame
had really attained a great height, he inhaled half a river of air into
his lungs, and, slowly dropping it out again, said, in a grimly mild
manner, "You don't snuff a bit--as far as I can see, the black
funereal pyre might rise up to the ceiling for all you would care. All
right! I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of this theatre myself till
supper-time; and while we're at supper I shall just say to you, as a
rational man, what there is to say on the subject." "Oh! yes, please,"
she said, quite delighted.

When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, he commenced:
"You see, I had been looking forward to my working at night being
attended with several advantages, because I thought you would have
managed this easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the
right time, as a Roman lady of high rank made herself do duty as a
candlestick for her celebrated husband, Pliny junior (to use a
commercial expression), and held his light for him. I was mistaken, it
appears; for, unfortunately, I can't write with my toes under the
table, like a person with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a
clairvoyant might. The only use the candle is to me, in the
circumstances, is that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to
get some practice in stoicism. It had often as much as twelve inches of
eclipse, like a sun, and I wished in vain, darling, for an invisible
eclipse--such as frequently occurs in the heavens. The cursed slag of
our candle hatches just these obscure ideas and gloomy night thoughts,
which authors (too) often have. Whereas, gracious goodness! if you had
only snuffed, as you ought to have done----"

"You're in fun, are you not?" she asked. "My stitches are much smaller
than your strokes, and I'm sure I saw quite well."

"Well, dear," he continued, "I'll proceed to point out to you that, on
the grounds of psychology and mental science, it isn't that it matters
a bit whether a person who is writing and thinking _sees_ a little more
or less distinctly or not, it's the snuffers and the snuff that he
can't get out of his head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip
up his ideas, and stop him, just as a log does a horse hobbled to it.
For even when you've only just snuffed the candle, and I'm in the full
enjoyment of the light, I begin to look out for the instant when you'll
do it next. Now, this watching being in itself neither visible nor
audible, can be nothing but a thought, or idea; and as every thought
has the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of all others,
it follows that all an author's other and more valuable ideas are sent
at once to the dogs. But this is by no means the worst of the affair.
I, of course, _ought_ not to have had to occupy my head with the idea
of candle-snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking; but when
the ardently longed-for snuffing never comes off at all, the black
smut on the ripe ear of light keeps growing longer--the darkness
deepening--a regular funereal torch feebly casting its ray upon a
half-dead writer, who can't drive from his head the thought of the
conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters asunder with one single
snip;--then, my dearest Lenette, it's not easy for the said writer to
help writing like an ass, and stamping like a dromedary. At least, I
express my own opinion and experience on the subject!"

On this, she assured him that, if he were really serious, she would
take great care to do it properly next evening.

And, in truth, this story must give her credit for keeping her word,
for she not only snuffed much oftener than the night before, but, the
fact is, she _hardly ever left off_ snuffing, particularly after he had
nodded his head once or twice by way of thanks.

"Don't snuff _too_ often, darling," he said, at length, but very, very
kindly. "If you attempt _too_ fine sub-sub-subdivisions (fractions of
fractions of fractions of fractions) of the wick, it'll be almost as
bad as ever--a candle snuffed too short gives as little light as one
with an overgrown wick which you may apply to the lights of the world
and of the Church, that's to say if you _can_. It's only for a short
while _before_ and _after_ the snuffing, _entre chien et loup_ as it
were, that that delicious middle-age of the soul prevails when it can
see to perfection; when it is truly a life for the gods, a just
proportion of black and white, both in the candle and on the book."

I and others really do not see any great reason to congratulate
ourselves upon this new turn of events. The poor's advocate has
evidently laid upon himself the additional burden, that all the time he
is writing he has to keep watching and calculating,--superficially
perhaps, but still, watching and calculating--the mean term, or
middle-distance, between the long wick and the short. And what time has
he left for his work?

Some minutes after, when the snuffing came a little too soon, he asked,
though somewhat doubtfully, "Dirty clothes for the wash already?" Next
time, as she let it be almost too long before she snuffed, he looked at
her interrogatively, and said, "Well? well?"

"In one instant," said she. By-and-by, he having got rather more deeply
absorbed than usual in his writing, and she in her work, he found, when
he suddenly came to himself and looked, one of the longest spears in
the candle that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round
it to the bargain.

"Oh, good Lord! 'Pon my soul, this is really the life of a dog!" cried
he; and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he snuffed the candle--out.

This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital opportunity for
jumping up, flying into a passion, and pointing out to Lenette more in
detail how it was that she plagued and tormented him, however admirably
he might have arranged things; and, like all women, had neither rhyme
nor reason in her ways of doing things, always snuffing either too
close or not close enough. She, however, lighted the candle without
saying a word, and he got into a greater rage than before, and demanded
to be informed whether he had ever as yet asked anything of her but the
merest trifles possible to conceive, and if anybody but his own wedded
wife would have hesitated for a moment to attend to them. "Just answer
me," he said.

She did not answer him; she set the freshly-lighted candle on the
table, and tears were in her eyes. It was the first time he had caused
her a tear, since her marriage. In a moment, like a person magnetised,
he saw and diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his system;
and, on the spot, he cast out the old Adam, and shied him
contemptuously away into a corner. This was an easy task for _him_; his
heart was always so open to love and justice, that the moment these
goddesses came into view, the tone of anger with which he had commenced
a sentence would fall into gentle melody before he reached the end of
it; he could stop his battle-axe in the middle of its stroke.

So that a household peace was here concluded, the instruments thereof
being one pair of moist eyes and one pair of bright kind ones; and a
Westphalia treaty of peace accorded one candle to each party, with
absolute freedom of snuffing.

But the peace was soon embittered, inasmuch as Penia, goddess of
poverty (who has thousands of invisible churches all about the country,
where most houses are her tabernacles and lazar cells), began to make
manifest her bodily presence and her all-controlling power. There was
no more money in the house. But, rather than place his honour and his
freedom in pledge, and incur obligations which he had less and less
prospect of repaying--I mean, rather than borrow--he would have sold
all he had, and himself into the bargain, like the old German. It is
said, the national debt of England, if counted out in dollars, would
make a ring round the earth, like a second equator; however, I have not
as yet measured this nose-ring of the British Lion, this annular
eclipse, or halo, round the sun of Britain, myself. But I know that
Siebenkæs would have considered a negative money-girdle of this sort
about his waist to be a penance-belt stuck full of spines, or an iron
ring, such as people who tow boats have on; a girdle compressing the
heart in a fatal manner. Even supposing he were to borrow, and then
stop payment, as nations and banking-houses do--a catastrophe which
debtors and aristocratic persons, who have their wits about them,
manage to avoid without difficulty, by the simple expedient of never
_beginning_ payment--yet, having only one friend whom he could convert
into a creditor (Stiefel), he couldn't possibly have seen this dear
friend, who was in the first rank of his spiritual creditors already,
figuring in the fifth rank, or that of the unpaid. He therefore avoided
such a two-fold transgression as this would have been--a sin against
both friendship and honour--by pledging things of less value, namely,
household furniture.

He went back (but alone) to the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, and
peeped through the rail to see whether there were two ranks of dishes
or three. Alas! there wag but one rear-rank man of a plate standing
behind his front-rank man, like double notes of interrogation. He
marched the rear-rank man to the front accordingly, and gave him for
travelling companions and fellow-refugees a herring-dish, a sauce-boat,
and a salad-bowl. Having effected this reduction of his army, he
extended the remaining troops so as to occupy a wider front, and
subdivided the three large gaps into twenty small ones. He then moved
these disbanded soldiers to the sitting-room, and went and called
Lenette, who was in the bookbinder's room.

"I've been looking at our pewter cupboard for the last five or ten
minutes," he said. "I really shouldn't have noticed, if I hadn't known
it, that I had taken away the tureen and the plates. Should you?"

"Ah, indeed, I do notice it every day of my life," she declared.

Here, however, being rather uneasy at the idea of what might be
the result of _too_ long an inspection, he hurried her into the
sitting-room, where the dishes were which he had just taken out, and
made known his intention of transposing, like a clever musician, this
quartett from the key of pewter into that of silver. He proposed the
selling of them, that she might be got to agree the more easily to
their being pawned. But she pulled out every stop of the feminine organ,
the clarion, the stopped diapason, flute, bird-stop, _vox humana_, and,
lastly, the tremolo stop. He might say whatever he liked; _she_ said
whatever _she_ liked. A man does not try to arrest the iron arm of
necessity, or to avert it; he calmly awaits its stroke; a woman tries
to struggle away from its grip, at any rate for a few hours, before it
encircles her. It was in vain that Siebenkæs quietly and simply asked
her if she knew what else was to be done. To questions of this sort,
there float up and down in women's heads not one complete answer, but
thousands of half answers, which are supposed to amount to a whole one,
just as in the differential calculus an infinite number of straight
lines go to form a curved one. Some of these unripe, half-formed,
fugitive, mutually auxiliary answers were----

"He shouldn't have changed his name, and he would have had his mother's
money by this time."

"Of course, he might borrow."

"Look at all his clients, well off and comfortable, and he won't ask
them to pay him."

"He never dreams of asking a fee for defending the infanticide."

"And he shouldn't spend so much money." "He needn't have paid that
half-term's rent in advance." For the latter would have kept him going
for a day or two, you see!

It is always a vain task to oppose the "minority of one" of the
complete and true answer to the immense majority of feminine partial
proofs of this sort; women know, at any rate, thus much of the law of
Switzerland, that four half or invalid witnesses outweigh one whole or
valid one.[41] But the best way of confuting them is, to let them say
what they have got to say, and not utter a word yourself; they're
certain to diverge, before very long, into subsidiary or accessory
matters, which you yield to them, confuting them, as regards the real
subject of argument, simply by action. This is the only species of
confutation which they ever forgive. Siebenkæs, unfortunately,
attempted to apply the surgical bandage of philosophy to Lenette's two
principal members, her head and her heart, and therefore commenced as
follows--

"Dear wife, in the parish church you sing against worldly riches, like
the rest of the congregation, and yet you have them fixed on your heart
as firmly as your brooch. Now, I don't go to a church, it's true, but I
have a pulpit in my own breast, and I prize one single happy moment
more than the whole of this pewter dirt. Tell me truly now, has your
immortal heart been pained by the tragical fate of the soup-tureen, or
was it only your pericardium? The doctors prescribe tin, in powder, for
worms; and may not this miserable tin, which we have broken into little
pieces and swallowed, have had a similar effect on the abominable worms
of the heart? Collect yourself, and think of our cobbler here, does his
soup taste any the worse to him out of his painted iron _saucière_
because his bit of roast meat is eaten out of it too? You sit behind
that pincushion of yours, and can't see that society is mad, and drinks
coffee, tea, and chocolate out of different cups, and has particular
kinds of plates for fruit, for salad, and for herrings, and particular
sorts of dishes for hares, fish, and poultry. And I say that it will
get madder and madder as time goes on, and order as many kinds of fruit
plates from the china shops as there are different fruits in the
gardens--at least, I should do it myself; and if I were a crown prince,
or a grand master, I should insist upon having lark dishes and lark
knives, snipe dishes and snipe knives; neither would I carve the haunch
of a stag of sixteen upon any plate I had once had a stag of eight
upon. The world is a fine madhouse, and one gets up and preaches his
false doctrine in it when another has done, just as they do in a Quaker
meeting. So the Bedlamites think that only two follies are veritable
follies, follies which are past, and follies which are yet to come--old
follies and new; but I would show them that theirs partake of the
nature of both."

Lenette's only reply was an inexpressibly _gentle_ request: "Oh!
please, Firmian, do _not_ sell the pewter."

"Very well, then, I shan't!" (he answered, with a bitter satirical joy
at having got the brilliant neck of the pigeon fairly into the noose
which he had so long had ready baited for it). "The emperor Antoninus
sent his real silver plate to the mint, so that I might surely send
mine; but just as you like: I don't care twopence. Not an ounce of it
shall be old; I shall merely pawn! I'm much obliged to you for the
suggestion; and if I only hit the eagle's tail on St. Andrew's Day, or
the imperial globe, I can redeem the whole of it in a minute--I mean
with the money of the prize; at all events, the salad-bowl and the
soup-tureen. I think you're quite right. Old Sabel's in the house, is
she not? She can take the things and bring back the money."

She let it be so now. The shooting-match on St. Andrew's Day was her
Fortunatus's wishing-cap, the wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen
flying-apparatus fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the
flower-seeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned
heads also). Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word! But the poor
hope incredibly more than the rich; therefore it is that poor devils
are more apt to catch the infection of lotteries than the rich--just as
they are to catch the plague and other epidemics.

Siebenkæs--who looked down with contempt not only on the loss of his
household goods, but on the loss of his money--was secretly resolved
to leave the trash at the pawnbroker's, unredeemed for ever, like
a state-bond, even though he should chance to be king (at the
shooting-match), and convert the transaction into a regular sale some
future day, when he happened to be passing the shop.

After a few bright quiet days Peltzstiefel came again to make an
evening call. Amid the manifold embargoes laid upon their supplies, the
risks attending their smuggling operations, and as a tear or a sigh was
laid as a tax which _must_ necessarily be paid upon every loaf of
bread, Firmian had had no time, to say nothing of inclination, to
remember his jealousy. In Lenette's case, matters were necessarily
exactly reversed; and if she really has any love for Stiefel, it must
grow faster on his money-dunghill than on the advocate's field all over
wells of hunger. The Schulrath's eye was not one of those which read
the troubles of a household in a minute, though they are masked by
smiling faces; he noticed nothing of the kind. And for that very reason
it came to pass that this friendly trio spent a happy hour free from
clouds, during which, though the sun of happiness did not shine, yet
the moon of happiness (hope and memory) rose shimmering in their sky.
Moreover, Siebenkæs had the enjoyment of being provided with a
cultivated listener, who could follow and appreciate the jingle of the
bells on the jester's cap, the trumpet fanfares of his Leibgeberish
sallies. Lenette could neither follow nor appreciate them in the very
least, and even Peltzstiefel didn't understand him when he _read_ him,
but only when he _heard him talk_. The two men at first talked only of
persons, not of things, as women do; only that they called their
chronique scandaleuse by the name of History of Literature and Men of
Letters. For literary men like to know every little trait and
peculiarity of a great author--what clothes he wears, and what his
favourite dishes are. For similar reasons, women minutely observe every
little trait and peculiarity of any crown princess who happens to pass
through the town, even to her ribbons and fringes. From literary men
they passed to scholarship; and then all the clouds of this life melted
away, and in the land of learning, the fair realm of science, the
downcast sorrowful head, wrapped and veiled in the black Lenten
altar-cloth of hardship and privation, is lifted up once more. The soul
inhales the mountain air of its native land, and looks down from the
lofty peak of Pindus upon its poor bruised and wounded body lying
beneath--that body which it has to drag and bear about, sighing
under its weight. When some dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and-bone
reading-master, a poor curate with five children, or a baited and
badgered tutor, is lying woeful and wretched--every nerve quivering
under some instrument of torture--and a brother of his craft, plagued
by just as many instruments of torture as himself, comes and argues and
philosophises with him a whole evening, and tells him all the latest
opinions of the literary papers, then truly the sand-glass which marks
the hours of the torture[42] is laid on its side--Orpheus comes, all
bright and shining, with the lyre of knowledge in his hand, into the
psychic hell of the two brethren in office, the sad tears vanish from
their brightening eyes, the snakes of the furies twine into graceful
curls, the Ixion's wheel rolls harmoniously to the lyre, and these two
poor Sisyphuses sit resting quietly on their stones and listen to the
music. But the poor curate's, the reading-master's, the scholar's, good
wife, what is her comfort in her misery? She has none except her
husband, who ought, therefore, to be very tender to all her
shortcomings.

The reader was made aware in the first book that Leibgeber had sent
three programmes from Bayreuth. Stiefel brought the one, by Dr. Frank,
with him, and asked Siebenkæs to write a notice of it for the
'Kuhschnappel Heavenly Messenger.' He also took out of his pocket
another little book, to receive its sentence. The reader will hail both
these works with gladness, seeing that my hero and his has no money in
the house, and will be able to live for a day or two by reviewing them.
The second manuscript, which was in a roll, was entitled: 'Lessingii,
Emilia Galotti. Pro gymnasmatis loco latine reddita et publice acta,
moderante J. H. Steffens. Cellis 1788.'

It seems that a good many of the subscribers to the 'Heavenly
Messenger' have complained of the length of time which elapsed before
this work was noticed, drawing disadvantageous comparisons between the
'Messenger' and the 'Universal German Library;' for the latter,
notwithstanding the greatness of its universal German circulation,
notices good works within a few years of their birth--sometimes even as
early as the third year of their existence--so that the favourable
notice can frequently be bound up with the work, the first paper-covers
of it not being worn out before. The reason, however, why the 'Heavenly
Messenger' did not, and in fact could not, review more of the books of
the year 1788, was, that it was not until five years after that date
that it--first saw the light itself.

"Don't you think," said Siebenkæs, in a friendly manner to
Peltzstiefel, "that if I'm going to write proper notices of Messrs.
Frank and Steffens here, my wife should take care not to make a
thundering noise, swishing away with her broom at my back?"

"That might really be a matter of very considerable importance," said
Stiefel, gravely. Upon which a playful and somewhat abridged report of
the proceedings in the household action of inhibition was laid before
him. Wendeline fixed her kindly eyes on Peltzstiefel's face, striving
to read the _Rubrum_ (the red title), and the _Nigrum_ (the black body
matter) of his judgment there before it was pronounced. Both colours
were there. But though Stiefel's bosom heaved with genuine sighs of the
deepest affection for her, he nevertheless addressed her as follows--

"Madame Siebenkæs, this really won't do at all; for God hath not
created anything nobler than a scholar sitting at his writing. Hundreds
of thousands of people, ten times told, are sitting in every quarter of
the globe, as if on school-forms before him, and to all of these he has
to speak. Errors held by the wisest and cleverest people he has to
eradicate: ages, long since gone to dust and passed away, with those
who lived in them, he has to describe with accuracy and minuteness;
systems, the most profound and the most complex, he has to confute and
overthrow, or otherwise to invent and establish, himself. His light has
to pierce through massy crowns, through the Pope's triple tiara,
through Capuchin hoods and through wreaths of laurel--to pierce them
all and enlighten the brains within. This is his work; and this work he
can perform. But Madame Siebenkæs, what a strain on his faculties! What
a grand sustained effort is necessary! It is a hard matter and a
difficult to set up a book in type, but harder still to write it! Think
what the strain must have been when Pindar wrote, and Homer, earlier
still--I mean in the 'Iliad'--and so with one after another, down to
our own day. Is it any wonder, then, that great writers, in the
terrible strain and absorption of all their ideas, have often scarcely
known where they were, what they were doing, or what they would be at;
that they were blind and dumb, and insensible to everything but what
was perceived by the _five interior spiritual senses_, like blind
people, who see beautifully in their dreams, but in their waking state
are, as we have said, blind! This state of absorbedness and strain it
is which I consider to explain how it was that Socrates and Archimedes
could stand and be completely unconscious of the storm and turmoil
going on around them; how Cardanus in the profundity of his meditation
was unconscious of his Chiragra; others of the gout; one Frenchman of a
great conflagration, and a second Frenchman of the death of his wife."

"There, you see," said Lenette, much delighted, in a low voice to her
husband, "how can a learned gentleman possibly hear his wife when she's
at her washing and scrubbing?"

Stiefel, unmoved, went on with the thread of his argument: "Now, a fire
of this description can only be kindled in absolute and uninterrupted
calm. And this is the reason why all the great artists and men of
letters in Paris live nowhere but in the Rue Ste. Victoire; the other
streets are all too noisy. And it is hence that no smiths, tinkers, or
tinmen, are allowed to work in the street where a professor lives."

"No TINMEN especially," added Siebenkæs, very gravely. "It should
always be remembered that the mind cannot entertain more than
half-a-dozen of ideas at a time; so that if the idea of noise should
make its appearance as a wicked seventh, of course some one or other of
the previous ideas, which might otherwise have been followed up or
written down, takes its departure from the head altogether."

Indeed Stiefel made Lenette give him her hand as a pledge that she
would always stand still, like Joshua's sun, while Firmian was smiting
the foe with pen and scourge.

"Haven't I often asked the bookbinder myself," she said, "not to hammer
so hard upon his books, because my husband would hear him when he was
making _his_." However, she gave the Schulrath her hand, and he went
away contented with their contentment, leaving them quite hopeful of
quieter times.

But, ye dear souls, of how little use to you is this state of peace,
seeing ye are on half-pay and starving in this cold, empty, orphan
hospital of an earth--how little will it help you in these dim
labyrinthian wanderings of your destiny, of which even the Ariadne
clue-threads all turn to nets and snares? How long will the poor's
advocate manage to live on the produce of the pawned pewter, and on the
price of the two reviews which he is going to write? Only, we are all
like the Adam of the epic, and take our first night to be the day of
judgment, and the setting of the sun for the end of the world. We
sorrow for our friends, just as if there were no brighter future
YONDER, and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter future
HERE. For all our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.

                              CHAPTER VI.

   MATRIMONIAL JARS--EXTRA LEAFLET ON THE LOQUACITY OF WOMEN--MORE
     PLEDGING--THE MORTAR AND THE SNUFF-MILL--A SCHOLAR'S KISS--ON
     THE CONSOLATIONS OF HUMANITY--CONTINUATION OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER.

This chapter commences at once with pecuniary difficulties. The
wretched, leaky Danaid's bucket which our good couple had to use for
washing their groschen or two, their grains of gold-dust--few and far
between as they were--out of the sands of their Pactolus, had always
run dry again in the course of a couple of days, or of three at the
outside. On this occasion, however, they had something certain to go
upon, namely, the reviews of the two works; they could count upon four
florins certainly, if not upon five.

Early next day, after his morning kiss, Firmian seated himself upon his
critical judgment-bench again, and proceeded to pass his sentences. He
might have written an epic poem, so light were the trade-winds which
had hitherto been prevalent during the early hours of the day. From
eight o'clock in the morning till eleven in the forenoon, he was
engaged in holding up to the world in a favourable light the programme
of Dr. Frank of Pavia, which was entitled: 'Sermo Academicus de civis
medici in republica conditione atque officiis, ex lege præipue erutis.
Auct. Frank. 1785.' He criticised, praised, blamed, and made extracts
from this little production, till he thought he had covered enough
paper to earn what would suffice to redeem the pawned herring-dish,
salad-bowl, sauce-boat, and plates--his views on the work occupying one
sheet, four pages, and fifteen lines.

The morning had passed so pleasantly, in holding Vehmgericht in this
manner, that he thought he might as well go on, and hold another in the
afternoon on the other book. He had never ventured upon this before; in
the afternoons he had done advocate's work, not reviewer's, appearing
in the character of defendant (_maker_ of defence), not of fiscal
(prosecutor). He had ample reason for this, seeing that every afternoon
girls and maid-servants came with bonnets and caps, and with _mouths_
full of conversational treasures, which they at once unpacked; richer
in language than the Arabs, who have only a thousand _words_ to express
the same idea, these young women had a thousand _idioms_ for it, or
different ways of putting it;--and, as an organ when it's out of order,
immediately begins to cipher on twenty of its pipes or so at a time as
soon as you begin to work the bellows, though no notes may be pressed
down, so would they the moment the bellows of their lungs was set
a-going. He didn't mind this, however, seeing that at the particular
hours to which these feminine alarum clocks were set, he let his own
juristical alarum go rattling off too, and during the arguing of
Lenette's cases, went on with the arguing of his. He wasn't disturbed
by this; he maintained: "A lawyer is not to be put out, he can open and
close his sentences when he chooses--his periods are long tapeworms,
and can be lengthened or cut down with impunity--for each segment of
them is itself a worm, each comma a period."

But reviewing was another matter, and couldn't be done so well. At the
same time, I shall here faithfully transcribe for the benefit of the
unlearned (the learned have read the review long ago), so much as he
actually did manage to get done after his dinner. He wrote down the
title of Steffen's Latin translation of "Emilia Galotti," and proceeded
as follows--

"This translation meets a want which we have long experienced. It is,
indeed, a striking phenomenon, that so few of the German classics have
as yet been translated into Latin for the use of scholars, who, for
their part, have supplied us with German versions of nearly all the
Greek and Roman classic authors. The German nation can point to
literary productions of its own which are quite worthy of perusal by
scholars and by linguists, who, although they can translate them, do
not understand them, because they are not written in Latin.
Lichtenberg's 'Pocket Calendar' has appeared simultaneously in a German
edition--for the English, who are studying German--and in a French for
our own _haute noblesse_. But why should not German original works, and
even the very 'Calendar' itself, be made known to linguists and to
scholars by means of a good and faithful Latin translation? There can
be no doubt that they would be the very first to be struck by the great
resemblance which may be traced between the odes of Ramler and those of
Horace, if the former were but translated. The reviewer must confess
that it has always been matter of surprise, as well as regret, to him
that but two correct editions of Klopstock's 'Messiah' have as yet
appeared, the original edition and his own--and that there is no Latin
edition of it for scholars--(Lessing having scarcely translated the
'Invocation' in his miscellaneous writings)--nor one in the curial
style for lawyers, nor a plain prose one for the commercial world, nor
one in Jew-German for the Jewish community."

When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, because a housemaid
_wouldn't_ stop, but went on reiterating what her mistress had gone on
re-iterating, namely, how her night-cap was to be done up; twenty times
did she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, and laid
weight on the necessity for speedy execution. Lenette answered her
tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her
own coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer
said--

"I haven't written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette,
tell me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say,
'It's four o'clock,' instead of 'The four quarters to four have gone?'
Can no woman say, 'The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,' and then an
end of the matter? Can no woman say, 'I want a dollar for it,' and
there an end of the story? Nor, 'Run in again to-morrow!' and no more
about it? Can _you_ not do it, for instance?"

Lenette answered very coldly, "Oh! of course you think everybody thinks
just as you think yourself!"

Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent millions of male
rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents--namely, curses--up skywards. The
first was, that whenever she gave the servant an order, she did it as
if it were a memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room with
her and repeated the order in question three or four times more in the
passage. The second was, that let Siebenkæs shout a thing to her, as
distinctly as man could, her first answer was, "What?" or, "What do you
say?" Now, I not only advise ladies always to demand a "second of
exchange" of this sort when they are in any embarrassment for an
answer, and I laud them for so doing; but in cases where what is
required of them is attention, not the truth, this _ancora_ and _bis_
which they cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste time, is as
cumbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind are trifles in
married life only so long as the sufferer by them does not complain of
them. But when they have been found fault with they are worse than
deadly sins, and felonies, and adulteries--seeing that they occur much
more frequently.

If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms of the above
description; what he would do would be, not deliver a serious lecture,
but (because this is a good opportunity) write the following

                   EXTRA LEAFLET ON FEMALE LOQUACITY.

"The author of the work on 'Marriage' has said, 'A woman who does not
talk is a stupid woman.' But it is easier to be his encomiast than his
disciple. The cleverest women are often silent with women, and the most
stupid and most silent are often both with men. On the whole, this
statement, which has been applied to the male sex, is true also of the
female, namely, that those who think most have least to say; as frogs
cease croaking when a light is brought to the side of their pond.
Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of women is a result of the
sedentary nature of their occupations. Men, whose work is sedentary,
such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in common with women not
only their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity.

"The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are employed, are also
the playgrounds of the feminine imagination, and their needles become
little magic wands, wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of
spirits filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book
distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting of a whole pair
of stockings. Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking that
they may not be made to work; but many a woman talks twice as much when
she is working as when she is not.

"I have devoted much thought to the question, what purpose this
peculiarity subserves in the economy of the universe. At first it might
strike us that Nature has ordained these re-iterations of that which
has been already said with a view to the development of metaphysical
truths: for, as demonstration, according to Jacobi and Kant, is merely
a series, or progression, of identical propositions, it is evident that
women, who always proceed from the same thing to the same thing, are
continually demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the
object which Nature has chiefly had in view is the following. Accurate
observers of nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves of
trees keep up their constant fluttering motion is that the atmosphere
may be purified by this perpetual flagellation--this oscillation of the
leaves having very much the effect of a light and gentle breeze.[43] It
would, however, be very wonderful had Nature--always economising her
forces, Nature, who never does anything in vain--ordained this much
longer oscillation, this seventy years' wagging of the feminine tongue,
to no definite purpose. For the purpose in question, however, we have
not far to seek. It is the same which is subserved by the quivering of
the leaves of trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the
feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up the
atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. The moon has her
ocean of water, and the feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir
into salubrity and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal
Pythagorean noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemics,
and Chartreuses of nuns would become pesthouses. Hence it is that
diseases of the pestiferous type are less frequent among civilised
nations, who talk the most. And hence Nature's beneficent arrangement
that it is exactly in the largest cities--and moreover in the
winter--and moreover indoors--and in large assemblages--that women talk
most, inasmuch as it is exactly in these places and at these periods
that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged with the largest
proportion of carbonic acid and other products of respiration, &c.,
requiring to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And, indeed,
Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments;
for, although many European women have endeavoured to imitate
those of America--who fill their mouths with water in order to keep
silence--and, while making calls, fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet
these fluids have been found rather to facilitate than to prevent the
free flow of feminine speech.

"I trust that in this I am far from being like the narrow-minded
teleologists, who, to every grand sun-path, or sun-orbit of Nature,