from bosom, and rendering impossible that streaming of heart-fires, that mounting flame from meeting brands, out of whose wondrous baptism come the consecrate deeds of mankind.  Go to China, and to any living soul you obtain no access, or next to none,—­such disastrous roods of etiquette are interposed between.  It is as if one very cordially shook hands with you by means of a pair of tongs or a ten-foot pole.  Indeed, it is hardly a man that you meet; it is a piece of automatic ceremony.  Nor is it in China alone that men may be found who can hardly be accredited with proper personality.  As one dying may distribute his property in legacies to various institutions and organizations,—­so much, for example, to the Tract Society, so much to the Colonization Society, and the like,—­in the same manner do many make wills at the outset of life for the disposal of their own personal powers, and do nothing afterward but execute this testament,—­executing themselves in another sense at the same time.  They parcel out themselves, their judgment, their conscience, and whatsoever pertains to their spiritual being, among the customs, traditions, institutions, etiquettes of their time, and renounce all claim to a free existence.  After such a piece of spiritual felo-de-se, the man is nothing but one wheel in a machine, or even but one cog upon a wheel.  Thenceforth he merely hangs together;—­simple cohesion is the utmost approximation to action which can be truly attributed to him.

And as nothing is so ridiculous, so, few things are so mischievous, as the sincere insincerity, the estrangement from fact, of those who have thus parted with themselves.  It is worse, if anything can be worse, than hypocrisy itself.  The hypocrite sees two things,—­the fact and the fiction, the gold and its counterfeit; he has virtue enough to know that he is a hypocrite.  But the post-mortem man, the walking legacy, does not recognize the existence of eternal Fact; it has never occurred to his mind that anything could be more serious than “spiritual taking-on” and make-belief.  An innocent old gentleman, being at a play where the heroine is represented as destroyed in attempting to cross a broken bridge, rose, upon seeing her approach it, and in tones of the deepest concern offered his opinion that said bridge was unsafe!  The post-mortem man reverses this harmless blunder, and makes it anything but harmless by the change; as that one took theatricals to be earnest fact, so this conceives virtue itself to consist in posturing; he thinks gold a clever imitation of brass, and the azure of the sky to be a kind of celestial cosmetic; in fine, formalities are the realest things he knows.  It is said, that, in the later days of Rome, the augurs and inspectors of entrails could not look each other in the face during their ceremonies, for fear of bursting into a laugh.  But still worse off than these pitiful peddlers of fraud is he who feigns without knowing that he feigns,—­feigns unfeignedly,