Shadow-hunted shadows is the very text for Mr. Carlyle. World’s memory is very whimsical now and then, he says, in recording the forgotten exploits of Johann, King of Bohemia, “all which have proved voiceless in the World’s memory; while the casual Shadow of a Feather he once more has proved vocal there.” And a whole chapter is devoted to, and entitled, a Kaiser hunting Shadows,—Kaiser Karl with his Pragmatic Sanction to wit, and similar projects, aims, or hobbies, more or less shadowy and unsubstantial, all. “There was another vast Shadow, or confused high-piled continent of shadows, to which our poor Kaiser held with his customary tenacity. To procure adherences and assurances to this dear Pragmatic Sanction, was even more than the shadow of the Spanish crown,” the one grand business of his life henceforth. “Shadow of Pragmatic Sanction, shadow of the Spanish crown,—it was such shadow-huntings of the Kaiser in Vienna” that thwarted the Prussian Double-marriage. Another object which Kaiser Karl pursued with some diligence, and which “likewise proved a shadow,” was his Ostend East India Company, which gave much disturbance to mankind. “This was the third grand shadow which the Kaiser chased, shaking all the world, poor crank world, as he strode after it.” Foiled in this, as in another and another chase, no wonder he grew more and more saturnine, and “addicted to solid taciturn field-sports. His Political ‘Perforce Hunt (_Parforce Jagd_),’ with so many two-footed terriers, and legationary beagles, distressing all the world by their baying and their burrowing, had proved to be of Shadows; and melted into thin air, to a very singular degree!” Many chapters later Mr. Carlyle recurs to his picture of the “Kaiser in his Shadow-hunt, coursing the Pragmatic Sanction chiefly, as he has done these twenty years past”—and so begins a chapter entitled, by a mixed metaphor, “Kaiser’s Shadow-hunt has caught Fire”—by contact, namely, with inflammable Poland. And a subsequent chapter details the damages the poor Kaiser had to pay for meddling in Polish elections,—“for galloping thither in chase of Shadows.... This may be considered as the consummation of the Kaiser’s Shadow-hunt; or at least its igniting and exploding point.... Shadow-hunt is now all gone to Pragmatic Sanction, as it were: that is now the one thing left in Nature for a Kaiser; and that he will love, and chase, as the summary of all things.” From this point we see him go steadily down, and at a rapid rate,—getting into disastrous Turkish wars, “with as little preparation for War or Fact as a life-long Hunt of _Shadows_ presupposes.” Or let us take our stand, with the same philosopher, in that _Œil-de-Bœuf_, in the Versailles Palace Gallery—through which what figures have passed, and vanished! “Figures? Men? They are fast-fleeting Shadows; fast chasing each other: it is not a Palace, but a Caravansera.”