periods more remote, he found less difficult. For the last four centuries, the Slawkenbergs of this house were all either booksellers, compilers, or tallowchandlers. Their occupations antecedently to that date are not clearly ascertained.

In this account of his family, which I am forced to say is rather tedious, Slawkenberg introduces a great number of prosy observations on the trades of authorship, tallow-chandlery, and bookselling, in general. Duty obliges me to subjoin a part of them, for I confess I owe them many valuable suggestions.

"In the abstract idea of tallow-chandlery," he remarks, "I find the analogon of bibliogeny, or book-producing; not only by observation of the alternations of my ancestors between these trades, but by consideration of the nature of things. Bibliopoly, or bookselling, on the other hand, I regard as the true analogon of master-tallow-chandlery; for as your poor devil of a literary journeyman does but heap together and cast in moulds such scraps of matter as he can pick up, to be disposed of by his superior at an advantage: so your journeyman tallow chandler does but melt up the fat and pour it about the wicks, for his superior to dispense to the community. It is by no means required of the master-workman in either case, that he put his hand to the work, or indeed that he have any mechanical knowledge of it."

Again, alluding to the idle humor of such authors as pretend to write for fame, or the public good, rather than for money, he delivers himself thus, in a strain of bitterness and sarcasm: "Is it not clear, that if the price is paid, the commodity is sold? What mean these canting hypocrites, who affect to say that a clergyman's salary, or an officer's pay, is not the whole matter for which the one preaches and the other fights?

"The very hound, do you say, hunts not for the game, but for the pleasure of hunting? the horse runs not for his oats, but for the pleasure of running? what of that?-are men to be compared to dogs and horses?—I scorn the comparison! Find the salary, and you shall have the priest with his sermon; hold out the fee and the doctor will instantly appear with his physic; starve your author well, and he will bring you the book; endow your office and lo! here is legion to fill it! But who is this subtle gentleman with his remark, that the sermon

is not for the salary, but the salary for the sermon ? or, in other words, that the man of God is supported that he may preach, and not that he preaches to be supported, with other cant of the sort. Now," says our author, "if any sane man will look fairly at the question, I think he will see more knavery than sense in it; for, as far as my experience goes, I find it the exact contrary;" here follows a rather subtle argumentation which I dare not quote, for fear of growing tedious: consult Slawk. ibid. i. v. Then follows a very general treatise of authorship. Pantol calling my attention to it, delivered himself as follows.

"In this treatise I find an old topic handled with a new skill. Authorship is treated as it should be, as the trade of trades, the work of works, the trick of tricks. Here are no circumventions of you with enticements of glory, honor, and a place among the worthies. Bread is the theme, when truth is told 'tis all for gold. Logic is the handle and money the blade.' Chalk is good for nest eggs,' and a dry book will bring good money; and be a white lie at worst. But be bold and make a good hit before they find you out, for when they do find you out, you must skulk; and then comes the devil and the bookseller; therefore, say I, be bold and throw out a brave trick," &c. &c., which is stark nonsense, and the direct contrary; for I know Pantol as my own soul, and sooner than cheat, or lie, or steal, he would cut his fingers off.

Slawkenberg enters very gravely upon his treatise of authorship. He considers it a species of moneymaniacal affection; the itch of writing, by metastasis from the palm of the left hand to the tips of the right fingers, like a skipping rheumatism. "Boys discover a propensity to daub and deface paper with colored liquids; by giving a right direction to this effort of nature you create writers and authors." "All authors were formerly cuttle-fishes, the natural food of the shark, and carried an ink bottle in their bellies; when attacked, they retired into oblivion behind clouds of their own making, as they now do under like circumstances behind an impenetrable fog of arguments, answers, and replications; sharks alone, of all fish, having no eyes to speak of, but an unquestionable nose, dart through the artificial night and snap them up infallibly."

Pantol commenting on this wonderful treatise made a number of observations in his manner, of which I took notes of the following; "Bookmaking is to other trades as an alms-house to a work-shop; a refuge for the lame, the blind, the insane, and the imbecile. The greater quantity of lies, fury, and drunkenness, a man has latent in him, the more evident his destiny to authorship." "We foolishly imagine that authors devour books; books on the contrary eat up authors."

Or this on Lying-suggested by the same treatise.

"Machiavelli treated tyranny as an art; there is a Pirate's Own Book, and a Manual of this and that, by Aretine and others, but why have we no Liar's Vade Mecum? for who, of mortals, rest more on art than your falsifiers? We have treatises of things in general, and of things in particular; we have sciences of that which is, but none of that which is not. It grieves me to the soul, reflecting on the multitude of benighted practitioners of this unvalued, inestimable, indispensable, immeasureable, unconfineable, pragmatical, imperfectable, high-political; auctorial, pictorial; fanciful, pleasant, pliant, pretty, pet science of that which is not,' or of the false, should have had no critical exposition; bating a few precepts of my Lord Bacon, (whose universal genius did not fail to touch the confines of this art,) and

a few poor instances in Aristotle and the Athenian sophists."

"Now," continued Pantol," when I reflect on the increasing necessity for skilful lying in affairs of state-church-lawincident to the rapid advances of science and the impossibility of carrying the multitude along with us, in consequence of which, all grades and sects of the learned are driven to the alternative of positive or negative lying; to say nothing of the growing appetite for wholesale lies, under the name of Novels of Society, and the like, in which the art lies not so much in the assemblage of incidents, as in giving impudence and vanity the air of lofty virtue and graceful enthusiasm ;nor of that newly invented apothegmatism, which gives a blank falsehood the air of Orphic wisdom; nor of those less elegant but not less useful practitioners, whose modesty aspires not to an immortality in lying, but is content in the exercise of a daily and hourly production of false facts; nor of the venders of all kinds of quackeries, noted for solid lying; nor of demagogical liars eminent, who practice the difficult and honorable art of corrupting the corrupt, and deceiving that which loves to be deceived.

"I say, reflecting upon all this, I am not without hopes of seeing this volume, and that no less remarkable one of the Universal Liar, reckoned among those which every gentleman should have in his library."

I have often had it in mind to give you some account of Slawkenberg's Expedition to the Nether Regions, and of the wonderful things he saw there. I should long ago have given the world a translation of that surprising Expedition, had it not been for an untoward circumstance, which was, namely, the difficulty I found in coming at the true meaning of the original. For you must know, that Slawkenberg is the inventor of a new and wonderful method of conveying ideas, which for want of a better word, I will call the symbolical method; though that word expresses but the half of what it should. To understand this method, you have only to know, that nature and the world were originally composed out of analogons, which are like the skins

DEMONOMANCY.

of a snake, lying one under the other. Beginning for example, with a grub; when it casts its analogon it becomes a beetle; the soul of the beetle, sloughing its analogon, (i. e. its carabaceous husk, or body,) becomes a butterfly; the butterfly, by a similar process takes on the figure of a bird; the bird of a rabbit; the rabbit of a dog; the dog of a monkey; the monkey of a carib; the carib of a negro; the negro of a man: the same soul, observe you, remains in the series from the first; and if you reckon on any other immortality than this, you are no Slawkenbergian. It must be observed that this hypothesis does not admit of making that vulgar distinction between the human and the animal soul, of which my friend Pantol is so absurdly

fond; for as by merely sloughing its skins or analogons, or bodies, or what you will, the paltry little soul of a grub at last comes to possess the body of a man, and to all intents and purposes becomes the soul of a human body-that is to say a human soul: Whereas, by Pantol's hypothesis, which he took out of some old book of the middle ages, or perhaps from Pythagoras, the human soul is a Divine image, lodged by Divine grace in a human body, and using a human brain and none other for its instrument, or organ. But this is a very dry topic, and by no means suited to the light and comical strain of these memoirs of mine, which, you will think are in some danger of being no memoirs at all, but a mere canto of common places out of Pantol and Slawkenberg; have patience with me, nevertheless, I pray you; there is Life and Opinions

to come.

The universe, I said, may be compared to a nest of boxes, each of which is the analogon or similar of the one it contains, or by which it is contained; a comparison, when I consider it, very gross and unapt; for, to apprehend spiritual matters, you must dissolve yourself and become fluent and permeant; letting the imagination pass into the whole, and be at the same instant everywhere present in thought; as when one dreams of a city, and sees everything that is transacted behind walls and in cellars as well as in the streets; which is the true condition of philosophizing on human affairs. Now you will be able to imagine a very curious and difficult thing, no less than that every atom of matter is absolutely alive, and vivified by a soul; and farther, that these monads, or atomic souls are assembled into groups, under the captaincy of certain vegetable monads, which were formerly in their condition, but since promoted for good conduct to the rank of mushrooms and polypuses. This system of promotion goes on through exactly 999 grades, up to man, who is generalíssimo.

Now let me warn you, that if you deny this, you betray yourself to be in the negative or unbelieving state. For all men are either negative or positive; infidel or faithful; those who scoff or deny, are infidel or negative: but fortunate are they who confide, and with a childlike confidence accept what is set before them without examination.

The series of visible things ends in

man, but with the detachment of the promoted spirit from its case, the body, the system of invisible, or of spiritual things begins. The number of ranks, or grades of visible forms is exactly 999, but that of invisible is infinite.

Nevertheless, of these spiritual orders there are two kinds, the wicked and the good; their grades are marked by the number of inferior orders which they embrace or govern. But the order of the negative or wicked souls is reversed; none are superior to man, and none are inferior to atoms. Thus, there are devils of all degrees, from particles of dirt and grubs, up to lions, apes, caribs, and men. For the present let us speak only of the negative or evil kind.

Now, as to these, they are divided into five ranks, or orders; of which the lowest occupy the inferior Hades, or Tartarus, and the highest flit to and fro over the earth and other planets. With the subdivisions of these five orders we need not just now concern ourselves; enough that they correspond with those of the animals and men on the earth and other planets; for Slawkenberg declares, and I cannot deny, that the planets are inhabited.

Now the gist of all this is, that Slawkenberg, by a happy fate, discovered a method of intercommunication with these spiritual beings, and came to a perfect knowledge of their characters, businesses, and modes of life; nay, he knows their names, and can at any moment put himself in communication with the rascalliest devil of them all. Have patience with me, I say again, and by the love I bear you, and by my respect for this immortal sage, I protest, vow, and promise, as I am a true Slawkenbergian, you shall hear the whole secret; so complete, you may be able, with but very little exertion, to accomplish as much as any seer or wizard could desire, without the least fear of being bamboozled by an over active fancy.

Having first resolved yourself into infinitude, letting imagination be to sense as greatest is to least, stick a pin in the toe of your slipper and fix your eyes upon it for two hours without stirring a muscle. It is necessary to have taken nothing inwardly but vegetables and water for three months previously, the effect of that diet being to weaken the animal and excite the spiritual functions, in a very surprising manner. The thing may best be done in an easy-chair, before a

sea-coal fire, having first locked the door; or better still, between two and five in the morning, after a vigilant meditation on the sacred numbers. Let the pin be nearly erect, with a slight inclination toward the west. At the end of the first hour, you will see the head of the pin double and treble itself; by-and-bye, sparkles and beams of magnetic influence will appear to stream from it towards your nose. Soon an arc of light will construct itself between the head of the pin and the tip of your nose, like the arc between the points of the calorimotor; this will enlarge and sparkle, and finally break into flashes and disappear; leaving a burr of blue light on the tip of your nose, with which you may retire to your bed, with no apprehension of setting fire to your curtains.

Now, to tell you the truth, and to speak soberly, the d-l is in this burr, as you will discover; for instead of falling asleep, no sooner are you well snugged in the sheets, when lo! Brigo and Honoklomen, the soft-skinned Krankogon and little Bildog, whose voice is like the creaking of wheels, will wait upon you. Listen to Totsvanim, give ear to Sapligotag, mincing spirits! how they play! Brigo will talk through your elbow, Krankogon through your sacrum ; Bildog will dance on your glandula pinealis, and go a swimming in water of the posterior ventricles. Totsvanim will tickle your cerebellum, and play a tune on the cords of your καμαριων.

Brigo appearing in the ventricle of the septum makes all things of a green color; knocking on the septum with his wand, he causeth flashes of green light to flow through the body; then can a man see as well with his heels as with his eyes. If I were to tell you all that Brigo can make you see when he tickles your sep. tum, it were a trial of your faith. Dare I say that the back of your hand shall be as visual as your eye, and with the

tips of your fingers you may see through any hypocrite's devices; nay, penetrate the seven-fold shield of sanctimony, and through a philosophical and pious disguise detect the atheist and the charlatan? Pleasant little Brigo can whip off the roofs of houses in a twinkling! He is your true clairvoyant; he can see into the middle of most mill-stones and take his pretty little oath there is nothing there but a grit or a flaw. Trust the devilkin! hath he not an eye?

Slawkenberg saw Cæsar die in the capital, and soon after witnessed with equal distinctness a great fire that is to happen at London in the year 1900. But that is a mere bagatelle to what he heard; for when Bildog entered the left ventricle, then was the creaking of Nebuchadnezzar's shoes quite audible. He heard a Quaker swear at his horse, though no man else did; he heard a firm believer whisper a doubt, though no man else did; he heard a smart scholar confess ignorance, though no man else did; but this was chips and straw to what he heard Thomas Carlyle say to himself about orthodoxy and the Scripture Miracles, which no man else did; nay, he heard Premier Guizot say the oddest things about Protestantism, which it were a shame to repeat; but if I were to tell you all that he heard, there were no end to the telling.

Soft-skinned Krankogon sitting at the root of the cerebellic tree gave a nicety of touch; then did Slawkenberg, says he, "touch the edge of the world where Nothing begins." "I felt the spinning of the globe, and its motion; I felt the sun rise and the waters flow; nay, as I live, I felt the rise and fall of stocks, and the flow of specie in the market; there was no motion that I did not feel, not excepting the down-slide of radicalism, the back-slide of the church, the slip-up of republics, and the onward surge of tyranny."