I must say, if, in the first place, as Bellarmin (the Catholic champion and contradictor) asserts, every man is his own Redeemer,--whence follows, in my judgment, that he is also his own Eve and serpent for his old Adam,--if, secondly, the pen of an extraordinarily good author is the snuffers of truth, just as, inversely, to Herr von Moser in prison the snuffers were a pen,--if, thirdly, Despotism may at last, instead of the living tree-stems (for it saws right into the world as if blind,) saw into the throne-saw-horse itself,--further, I must say, if, fourthly, every action (even the worst) has, like Christ, two unlike genealogies,--if in fact, fifthly, one and another reviewer carries his critical eye, wherewith he surveys everything, not on the apex of his skull (as Mahomet's saints are said to, in order not to see _beauties_), nor, like Argus, before and behind, but actually in front, under the stomach, over the gut, in the midst of the navel; if this man, in addition thereto, possesses no other heart than the linen one which the seamstress has stitched in the corner of the shirt-frill, and which lies over the pit of the heart, which one would call more sensibly the pit of the stomach,--finally I must say (at least I can do so), if, in the sixth place, true coherence, strict _concatenation_ of paragraphs, is perhaps the greatest ornament and soul of the so-called _unbound discourse_, or prose, which, however, is like a _bound_ harpsichord, and if, therefore, the sense, like an epic action, must begin at the end of the (rhetorical and temporal) period, because otherwise there would not be any at all....