keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor opinion is a slight foretaste of hell, as well as of heaven. Let the best peeress in this department write to me, and enclose it post-paid to the publishing office in Berlin, and give me her name, if she was capable of not flaying and impaling her poor _pastor fido_, nor persecuting him with backbitings, nor filling his heart full of bruises with the compression-machines of her hands, his head full of fissures with the bastinado of the fan, his breast full of blisters with her eyes, nor of giving him, as they do to tobacco, a mellowing with her tears.... At least I myself at this present moment come straight from such a house of correction and baiting-house, and my skin looks as pitiably as if I had a scalped one over my limbs. We will say no more of this. My intention in all this is to brace up the reader, because a wholly new rainy-constellation (Pleiad) which I have not at all named is rising in his horizon, to snow upon him. This will rage worse than all that has gone before. What I mean is this: An imperial citizen may be just giving the finishing touch to everything,--his coffers[48] and his enemies may have been already overturned, and his labors right well received by the public or the board,--his pleas for delay have been allowed, and the quinquenniats[49] of his debtors refused,--his youngest daughter, who, like the eldest of the French king's brother, is called Mademoiselle, may already have got through with the measles and her betrothal afterward; it avails him nothing, the worst of all, a whole Gehenna still awaits him on his book-shelves; for there may the fair spirits (let him have swallowed as he may all bitter salt of fate) have sliced for him, under the name of romance-manna, a hard tear-bread, which I, for my part, should be glad neither to bake nor to chew,--truly they may (to use another metaphor) have composed and placed in readiness for him dead-marches and funeral cantatas, which shall utterly upset him and make him so warm that his eyes shall run over.