Sartor Resartus: the life and opinions of Herr Teufelsdrocke eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 287 pages of information about Sartor Resartus.

Sartor Resartus: the life and opinions of Herr Teufelsdrocke eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 287 pages of information about Sartor Resartus.
strong sunshine in weeping skies, gives out variety of colors, some of which are prismatic.  Thus, with the aid of Time and of what Time brings, has the stripling Diogenes Teufelsdrockh waxed into manly stature; and into so questionable an aspect, that we ask with new eagerness, How he specially came by it, and regret anew that there is no more explicit answer.  Certain of the intelligible and partially significant fragments, which are few in number, shall be extracted from that Limbo of a Paper-bag, and presented with the usual preparation.

As if, in the Bag Scorpio, Teufelsdrockh had not already expectorated his antipedagogic spleen; as if, from the name Sagittarius, he had thought himself called upon to shoot arrows, we here again fall in with such matter as this:  “The University where I was educated still stands vivid enough in my remembrance, and I know its name well; which name, however, I, from tenderness to existing interests and persons, shall in nowise divulge.  It is my painful duty to say that, out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered Universities.  This is indeed a time when right Education is, as nearly as may be, impossible:  however, in degrees of wrongness there is no limit:  nay, I can conceive a worse system than that of the Nameless itself; as poisoned victual may be worse than absolute hunger.

“It is written, When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch:  wherefore, in such circumstances, may it not sometimes be safer, if both leader and led simply—­sit still?  Had you, anywhere in Crim Tartary, walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen Library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years:  certain persons, under the title of Professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission-fees,—­you had, not indeed in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary.  I say, imperfect; for if our mechanical structure was quite other, so neither was our result altogether the same:  unhappily, we were not in Crim Tartary, but in a corrupt European city, full of smoke and sin; moreover, in the middle of a Public, which, without far costlier apparatus than that of the Square Enclosure, and Declaration aloud, you could not be sure of gulling.

“Gullible, however, by fit apparatus, all Publics are; and gulled, with the most surprising profit.  Towards anything like a Statistics of Imposture, indeed, little as yet has been done:  with a strange indifference, our Economists, nigh buried under Tables for minor Branches of Industry, have altogether overlooked the grand all-overtopping Hypocrisy Branch; as if our whole arts of Puffery, of Quackery, Priestcraft, Kingcraft, and the innumerable other crafts and mysteries of

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Sartor Resartus: the life and opinions of Herr Teufelsdrocke from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.