“Historical Oil-painting,” continues Teufelsdrockh, “is one of the Arts I never practiced; therefore shall I not decide whether this subject were easy of execution on the canvas.  Yet often has it seemed to me as if such first outflashing of man’s Freewill, to lighten, more and more into Day, the Chaotic Night that threatened to engulf him in its hindrances and its horrors, were properly the only grandeur there is in History.  Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and understanding heart, picture George Fox on that morning, when he spreads out his cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cowhides by unwonted patterns, and stitches them together into one continuous all-including Case, the farewell service of his awl!  Stitch away, thou noble Fox:  every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of Slavery, and World-worship, and the Mammon-god.  Thy elbows jerk, as in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her Workhouse and Ragfair, into lands of true Liberty; were the work done, there is in broad Europe one Free Man, and thou art he!

“Thus from the lowest depth there is a path to the loftiest height; and for the Poor also a Gospel has been published.  Surely if, as D’Alembert asserts, my illustrious namesake, Diogenes, was the greatest man of Antiquity, only that he wanted Decency, then by stronger reason is George Fox the greatest of the Moderns, and greater than Diogenes himself:  for he too stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood, casting aside all props and shoars; yet not, in half-savage Pride, undervaluing the Earth; valuing it rather, as a place to yield him warmth and food, he looks Heavenward from his Earth, and dwells in an element of Mercy and Worship, with a still Strength, such as the Cynic’s Tub did nowise witness.  Great, truly, was that Tub; a temple from which man’s dignity and divinity was scornfully preached abroad:  but greater is the Leather Hull, for the same sermon was preached there, and not in Scorn but in Love.”

George Fox’s “perennial suit,” with all that it held, has been worn quite into ashes for nigh two centuries:  why, in a discussion on the Perfectibility of Society, reproduce it now?  Not out of blind sectarian partisanship:  Teufelsdrockh, himself is no Quaker; with all his pacific tendencies, did not we see him, in that scene at the North Cape, with the Archangel Smuggler, exhibit fire-arms?

For us, aware of his deep Sansculottism, there is more meant in this passage than meets the ear.  At the same time, who can avoid smiling at the earnestness and Boeotian simplicity (if indeed there be not an underhand satire in it), with which that “Incident” is here brought forward; and, in the Professor’s ambiguous way, as clearly perhaps as he durst in Weissnichtwo, recommended to imitation!  Does Teufelsdrockh anticipate that, in this age of refinement, any considerable