And Sampson, thirty years ago, sang the same tune, and mistook his inflammatory generation for the cool generation as yet unborn. In short, it is the characteristic of a certain blunder called genius to see things too far in advance. The surest way to avoid this is not to see them at all; but go blindly by the cant of the hour. Race moutonuiere va!
Sampson was indignant at finding that these gentry, after denouncing him for years as a quack, were pilfering his system, yet still reviling him. He went in a towering passion, and hashed them by tongue and pen: told them they were his subtractors now as well as detractors, asked them how it happened that in countries where there is no Sampson the type of disease remains unchanged, depletion is the practice, and death the result, as it was in every age?
No man, however stout, can help being deeply wounded when he sees his ideas stolen, yet their author and publisher disowned. Many men's hearts have been broken by this: but I doubt whether they were really great men.
Don't tell me Lilliput ever really kills Brobdignag. Except, of course, when Brobdignag takes medical advice of Lilliput.
Dr. Sampson had three shields against subtraction, detraction, and all the wrongs inventors endure: to wit, a choleric temper, a keen sense of humour, and a good wife. He storms and rages at his detracting pupils; but ends with roars of laughter at their impudence. I am told he still hopes to meet with justice some day, and to give justice a chance, he goes to bed at ten, for, says he—
“Jinny us, jinny us,
Take care of your carcass,”
and explains that no genius ever lived to ninety without being appreciated.
“If Chatterton and Keats had attended to this, they would have been all right. If James Watt had died at fifty he would have been all wrong; for at fifty he was a failure! so was the painter Etty, the English Tishin.” And then he accumulates examples.
His last distich bearing on Hard Cash is worth recording. “Miss Julee,” said he, “y' are goen to maerry int' a strange family—
Where th' ijjit puts the jinnyus
In-til a madhus,”