How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.

I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which, again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere Declinatorium[[24]] of our perpetual horizontal deviations from the cold pole of truth, and an Inclinatorium[[25]] of our vertical ones from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy, that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,' and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.

"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires, because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down as among the duties of medisance, and so pardon them, because they hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their incognito is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has; he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them; and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility, pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this historical drama—especially as he plays only the prompter—is the—Dog. Jean Paul."

I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this History to the learned world or not.

But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...

... Spitzius Hofmann is the name of the dog; he was the rat, and was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him to-day—for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my writing—glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty, I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his repeating-watch,—the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the sheets,—the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all to him;—he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons, but charms,—like the apothecaries, who draw at once medicines and aqua vitæ,—so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes have, and vice versâ; and as this biography is set to music, because Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far more than Gessner's harmonious prose[[26]]), he can, when he has done reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as if I read the work;—the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of its illuminated circle of waves before my island,—I stand on the best footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;—everything is ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body blooms, my mind produces,—and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death may lay under my roots,—nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing joyfully—thou good destiny!—my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart, while contemplating these leaves, may forget, in short, gentle dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings—O, why is a man sometimes so happy?

For this reason: because he is sometimes a littérateur. As often as Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special map the little life-stream of a literatus, which runs over some lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus: "Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an inkhorn,—his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer) the Easter-fair,—his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a bookcase,—and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the

[2. DOG-POST-DAY.]

Antediluvian History.—Victor's Plan of Life.