'So when a child, as playful children use,
Has burnt to tinder a stale last year's news,
The flame extinct he views the roving fire,
There goes my lady, and there goes the squire,
There goes the parson, oh! illustrious spark,
And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk.'
Cowper's Works, viii. 320.
Horace Walpole said that the 'Biographia Britannica ought rather to be called Vindicatio Britannica, for that it was a general panegyric upon everybody.' Prior's Malone, p. 115.
[493] See ante, p. 99.
[494]
'Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.'
Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, 1, 163.
[495] Observations on Insanity, by Thomas Arnold, M.D., London, 1782. BOSWELL.
[496] We read in the Gospels, that those unfortunate persons who were possessed with evil spirits (which, after all, I think is the most probable cause of madness, as was first suggested to me by my respectable friend Sir John Pringle), had recourse to pain, tearing themselves, and jumping sometimes into the fire, sometimes into the water. Mr. Seward has furnished me with a remarkable anecdote in confirmation of Dr. Johnson's observation. A tradesman, who had acquired a large fortune in London, retired from business, and went to live at Worcester. His mind, being without its usual occupation, and having nothing else to supply its place, preyed upon itself, so that existence was a torment to him. At last he was seized with the stone; and a friend who found him in one of its severest fits, having expressed his concern, 'No, no, Sir, (said he) don't pity me: what I now feel is ease compared with that torture of mind from which it relieves me.' BOSWELL.
[497] See ante, i. 446. 'Johnson was a great enemy to the present fashionable way of supposing worthless and infamous persons mad.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 203.