With what readiness our fancy, in this shattered state of the nerves, follows out the consequences which Teufelsdroeckh, with a devilish coolness, goes on to draw: 'What would Majesty do, could such an accident befall in reality; should the buttons all simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very Deed, as here in Dream?
_Ach Gott!_ How each skulks into the nearest hiding-place; their high State Tragedy (_Haupt- und Staats-Action_) becomes a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is the worst kind of Farce; _the tables_ (according to Horace), and with them, the whole fabric of Government, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilised Society, _are dissolved_, in wails and howls.' Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
Imagination, choked as in mephitic air, recoils on itself, and will not forward with the picture.

The Woolsack, the Ministerial, the Opposition Benches--_infandum! infandum!_ And yet why is the thing impossible?
Was not every soul, or rather every body, of these Guardians of our Liberties, naked, or nearly so, last night; 'a forked Radish with a head fantastically carved'?
And why might he not, did our stern fate so order it, walk out to St Stephen's, as well as into bed, in that no-fashion; and there, with other similar Radishes, hold a Bed of Justice?
'Solace of those afflicted with the like!' Unhappy Teufelsdroeckh, had man ever such a 'physical or psychical infirmity' before?
And now how many, perhaps, may thy unparalleled confession (which we, even to the sounder British world, and goaded-on by Critical and Biographical duty, grudge to re-impart) incurably infect therewith! Art thou the malignest of Sansculottists, or only the maddest?
'It will remain to be examined,' adds the inexorable Teufelsdroeckh, 'in how far the SCARECROW, as a Clothed Person, is not also entitled to benefit of clergy, and English trial by jury: nay perhaps, considering his high function (for is not he too a Defender of Property, and Sovereign armed with the _terrors_ of the Law ?), to a certain royal Immunity and Inviolability; which, however, misers and the meaner class of persons are not always voluntarily disposed to grant him.' * * * * * * 'O my Friends, we are (in Yorick Sterne's words) but as "turkeys driven with a stick and red clout, to the market": or if some drivers, as they do in Norfolk, take a dried bladder and put peas in it, the rattle thereof terrifies the boldest!'.