Stewart, the only man of nature* that ever appeared in the world."

By this time I am afraid the reader begins to suspect that he was crazy: and certainly, when I consider everything, he must have been crazy when the wind was at NNE; for who but Walking Stewart ever dated his books by a computation drawn-not from the creation, not from the flood, not from Nabonassar, or ab urbe condita, not from the Hegira-but from themselves, from their own day of publication, as constituting the one great era in the history of man by the side of which all other eras were frivolous and impertinent? Thus, in a work of his, given to me in 1812, and probably published in that year, I find him incidentally recording of himself that he was at that time" arrived at the age of sixty-three, with a firm state of health acquired by temperance, and a peace of mind almost independent of the vices of mankind—because my knowledge of life has enabled me to place my happiness beyond the reach or contact of other men's follies and passions, by avoiding all family connections, and all ambitious pursuits of profit, fame, or power" On reading this passage, I was anxious to ascertain its date; but this, on turning to the title-page, I found thus mysteriously expressed: "In the 7000th year of Astronomical History, and the first day of Intellectual Life or Moral World, from the era of this work." Another slight indication of craziness appeared in a notion which obstinately haunted his mind, that all the kings and rulers of the earth would

* In Bath he was surnamed the "Child of Nature;" which arose from his contrasting, on every occasion, the existing man of our present experience with the ideal or Stewartian man that might be expected to emerge in some myriads of ages--to which latter man he gave the name of the Child of Nature.

confederate in every age against his works, and would hunt them out for extermination as keenly as Herod did the innocents of Bethlehem. On this consideration, fearing that they might be intercepted by the long arms of these wicked princes before they could reach that remote Stewartian man or his precursor to whom they were mainly addressed, he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work, properly secured from damp, &c., at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who, in their turn, were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus, if the truth was not to be dispersed for many ages, yet the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried on this and that continent, in secret spots on Mount Caucasus-in the sands of Biledulgerid-and in hiding-places amongst the forests of America, and was to rise again in some distant age, and to vegetate and fructify for the universal benefit of man,this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation; and, in defiance of a myriad of kings crusading against him, Walking Stewart was to stretch out the influence of his writings through a long series of λañadпpogo* to that child of nature whom he saw dimly through a vista of many centuries. If this were

"λaμτadnpogos:"-Lamp or torch bearers, the several parties to an obscure Grecian game. The essential point known to us moderns is, that, in running, they passed on to each other a lighted torch, under what conditions, beyond that of keeping the torch burning, is very imperfectly explained. But already this feature of the game, without further details, qualifies the partakers in it to represent symbolically those who, from generation to generation, pass onwards the traditions of gathering knowledge.

madness, t seemed to me a somewhat sublime madness: and I assured him of my co-operation against the kings, promising that I would bury the "Harp of Apollo" in my own orchard in Grasmere at the foot of Mount Fairfield; that I would bury the "Apocalypse of Nature" in one of the coves of Helvellyn, and several other works in several other places best known to myself. He accepted my offer with gratitude; but he then made known to me that he relied on my assistance for a still more important service-which was this: in the lapse of that vast number of ages that would probably intervene between the present period and the period at which his works would have reached their destination, he feared that the English language might itself have mouldered away. "No!" I said, "that was not probable: considering its extensive diffusion, and that it was now transplanted into all the continents of our planet, I would back the English language against any other on earth." His own persuasion, however, was, that the Latin was destined to survive all other languages; it was to be the eternal as well as the universal language; and his desire was that I should translate his works, or some part of them, into that language.* This I promised;

* I was not aware until the moment of writing this passage, that Walking Stewart had publicly made this request three years after making it to myself: opening the "Harp of Apollo," I have just now accidentally stumbled on the following passage:-" This stupendous work is destined, I fear, to meet a worse fate than the aloe, which, as soon as it blossoms, loses its stalk. This first blossom of reason is threatened with the loss of both its stalk and its soil: for, if the revolutionary tyrant should triumph, he would destroy all the English books and energies of thought. I conjure my readers to translate this work into Latin, and to bury it in the ground, communicating on their death-beds only its place of concealment to men of nature."

From the title-page of this work, by the way, I learn that "the 7000th year of Astronomical History" is taken from the Chinese tables, and co incides (as I had supposed) with the year 1812 of our computation.

and I seriously designed at some leisure hour to translate into Latin a selection of passages which should embody an abstract of his philosophy. This would have been doing a service to all those who might wish to see a digest of his peculiar opinions cleared from the perplexities of his peculiar diction, and brought into a narrow compass from the great number of volumes through which they are at present dispersed. However, like many another plan of mine, it went unexecuted.

On the whole, if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence-but rather exalted them. The old maxim, indeed, that "Great wits to madness sure are near allied,” the maxim of Dryden and the popular maxim, I have heard disputed by Mr Coleridge and Mr Wordsworth, who maintain that mad people are the dullest and most wearisome of all people. As a body, I believe they are so. But I must dissent from the authority of Messrs Coleridge and Wordsworth so far as to distinguish. Where madness is connected, as it often is, with some miserable derangement of the stomach, liver, &c., and attacks the principle of pleasurable life, which is manifestly seated in the central organs of the body (i. e., in the stomach and the apparatus connected with it), there it cannot but lead to perpetual suffering and distraction of thought; and there the patient will be often tedious and incoherent. People who have not suffered from any great disturbance in those organs are little aware how indispensable to the process of thinking are the momentary influxes of pleasurable feeling from the regular goings on of life in its primary function; in fact, until the pleasure is withdrawn or obscured, most people are not aware that they have any pleasure from the due action of the great central machinery

of the system: proceeding in uninterrupted continuance, the pleasure as much escapes the consciousness as the act of respiration: a child, in the happiest stage of its existence, does not know that it is happy. And, generally, whatsoever is the level state of the hourly feeling is never put down by the unthinking (i. e., by 99 out of 100) to the account of happiness: it is never put down with the positive sign, as equal to + x; but simply as = 0. And men first become aware that it was a positive quantity, when they have lost it (i. e., fallen into x). Meantime the genial pleasure from the vital processes, though not represented to the consciousness, is immanent in every act, impulse, motion, word, and thought: and a philosopher sees that the idiots are in a state of pleasure, though they cannot see it themselves. Now I say that, where this principle of pleasure is not attacked, madness is often little more than an enthusiasm highly exalted; the animal spirits are exuberant and in excess; and the madman becomes, if he be otherwise a man of ability and information, all the better as a companion. I have met with several such madmen; and I appeal to my brilliant friend, Professor Wilson of Edinburgh, who is not a man to tolerate dulness in any quarter, and is himself the ideal of a delightful companion, whether he ever met a more amusing person than that madman who took a post-chaise jointly with him and myself, from Penrith to Carlisle, long years ago, when he and I were hastening with the speed of fugitive felons to catch the Edinburgh mail. His fancy and his extravagance, and his furious attacks on Sir Isaac Newton, like Plato's suppers, refreshed us not only for that day, but whenever they recurred to us; and we were both griced when we heard some time afterwards, from a Cambridge man, that he had met our clever friend in a