This letter we will copy as it came to us. It will be all we can say farther of Albert and Consuelo, whose subsequent career is utterly unknown.
[16]Many of these grades are of different creations and of different rites. Some are of a date posterior to the age of which we write. We commit the rectification of them to the learned Tilers. There are, in some rites, more than one hundred degrees.
[17]Every effort has been made to translate this masonic (?) jargon into something like English; with what success none but the Invisibles can tell.
[18]By means of such indications, the story of John Kreysoder seems to us to be the most wonderful of the romances of Hoffman. The author having died before the end of his work, the poem is ended by the Imagination in a thousand forms, the one more fantastic than the other. Thus a noble river, as it approaches its mouth, is ramified into a thousand passes, which work their way amid the golden sands of the sea shore.—TRANSLATOR.
[19]The French word is frotteur, and its meaning is strictly "rubber" or "polisher."
[20]Many are yet preserved in private museums in Germany.
[21]See the character of the Abbess of Quidlemburg, in Thibault, and the strange stories he tells of her.
[22]See note at the end of the book.