At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by documentary evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof, but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste aux ânes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman; and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_, "shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that, instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios." 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.