Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I maintain in several of the German cities;--my honored father pays for them;--in most places one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author, from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course of life is like a dark, unfrequented _cul de sac_, but whom one of my envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror, which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all, into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,--the case may occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair, buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of _Indian_ plants which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter. People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors near me. But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out. No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery, and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge, has seemed thus far to avert the discovery of the _true_ names of my histories, and, indeed, with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject, not one has smelt the mouse,--and truly fortunate for the world; for so soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.