Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports, would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now, for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the Pointeurs.[23] I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies me--without neglecting other duties--from month to month with as many personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;--the smallest trifles are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every _cul de sac_, servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a hand-and-horse service of good luck, no one of us can wonder,--that is, I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,--with such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,--with such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,--in short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or Montgolfiers,[24]--it cannot of course be anything but just what is expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much) on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself, and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy _tooth_ of time,--especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by the tooth-saw of the critical file,--shall be able to make any impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but unhappily every nature holds itself,--as Dr. Crusius does the world,--not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.