madness, it 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 coincides (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 intox). 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 grieved when we heard some time afterwards, from a Cambridge man, that he had met our clever friend in a

stage-coach under the care of a brutal keeper.Such a madness, if any, was the madness of Walking Stewart: his health was perfect; his spirits as light and ebullient as the spirits of a bird in spring-time; and his mind unagitated by painful thoughts, and at peace with himself. Hence, if he was not an amusing companion, it was because the philosophic direction of his thoughts made him something more. Of anecdotes and matters of fact he was not communicative: of all that he had seen in the vast compass of his travels he rarely availed himself in conversation. I do not remember, at this moment, that he ever once alluded to his own travels in his intercourse with me, except for the purpose of weighing down, by a statement grounded on his own great personal experience, an opposite statement of many hasty and misjudging travellers which he thought injurious to human nature: the statement was this, that, in all his countless rencounters with uncivilised tribes, he had never met with any so ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless man, who was able to make them understand that he threw himself upon their hospitality and forbearance.

On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary. He had seen and suffered much amongst men; yet not too much, or so as to dull the genial tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind was a mirror of the sentient universe the whole mighty vision that had fleeted before his eyes in this world: the armies of Hyder Ali and his son Tippoo, with oriental and barbaric pageantry; the civic grandeur of England; the great deserts of Asia and America; the vast capitals of Europe; London, with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its "mighty heart;" Paris, shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions; the silence of Lapland; and the solitary

forests of Canada; with the swarming life of the torrid zone; together with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow that he had participated by sympathy —lay like a map beneath him, as if eternally co-present to his view, so that, in the contemplation of the prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the parts, or occupy his mind with details. Hence came the monotony which the frivolous and the desultory would have found in his conversation. I, however, who, by accidents of experience, am qualified to speak of him, must pronounce him to have been a man of great genius, and, with reference to his conversation, of great eloquence. That these were not better known and acknowledged was owing to two disadvantages-one grounded in his imperfect education, the other in the peculiar structure of his mind. The first was this: like the late Mr Shelley, he had a fine vague enthusiasm, and lofty aspirations, in connection with human nature generally and its hopes; and like him he strove to give steadiness, a uniform direction, and an intelligible purpose to these feelings, by fitting to them a scheme of philosophical opinions. But unfortunately the philosophic system of both was so far from supporting their own views, and the cravings of their own enthusiasm, that, as in some points it was baseless, incoherent, or unintelligible, so in others it tended to moral results from which, if they had foreseen them, they would have been themselves the first to shrink, as contradictory to the very purposes in which their system had originated. Hence, in maintaining their own system, they found themselves painfully entangled, at times, with tenets pernicious and degrading to human nature. These were the inevitable consequences of the TeWrov sudos in their speculations; but were naturally TEWTOV Eudos:"-The first (or fundamental) falsehood.

B-VIII.