“Aye, and it is!”
Have patience good reader, and hear me to the end! There is a reason why it seems so; and the reason is, because all such eccentricities are recorded here in newspapers and magazines, so that none of them are lost; anti the most remarkable are brought forward from time to time, in popular compilations. A collection of what is called Eccentric Biography is to form a portion of Mr. Murray's Family Library.
But eccentric characters probably are more frequent among us than among most other nations; and for this there are two causes. The first is to be found in that spirit of independence upon which the English pride themselves, and which produces a sort of Drawcansir-like bravery in men who are eccentrically inclined. It becomes a perverse sort of pleasure in them to act preposterously, for the sake of showing that they have a right to do as they please, and the courage to exercise that right, let the rest of the world think what it will of their conduct.
The other reason is that mad-houses very insufficiently supply the place of convents, and very ill also. It might almost be questioned whether convents do not well nigh make amends to humanity for their manifold mischiefs and abominations, by the relief which they afford as asylums for insanity, in so many of its forms and gradations. They afford a cure also in many of its stages, and precisely upon the same principle on which the treatment in mad-houses is founded: but oh! how differently is that principle applied! That passive obedience to anothers will which in the one case is exacted by authority acting through fear, and oftentimes enforced by no scrupulous or tender means, is in the other required as a religious duty—an act of virtue,— a voluntary and accepted sacrifice,—a good work which will be carried to the patient's account in the world to come. They who enter a convent are to have no will of their own there; they renounce it solemnly upon their admission; and when this abnegation is sincerely made, the chief mental cause of insanity is removed. For assuredly in most cases madness is more frequently a disease of the will than of the intellect. When Diabolus appeared before the town of Mansoul, and made his oration to the citizens at Ear-Gate, Lord Will-be-will was one of the first that was for consenting to his words, and letting him into the town.
We have no such asylums in which madness and fatuity receive every possible alleviation, while they are at the same time subjected to the continual restraint which their condition requires. They are wanted also for repentant sinners, who when they are awakened to a sense of their folly and their guilt, and their danger, would fain find a place of religious retirement, wherein they might pass the remainder of their days in preparing for death. Lord Goring, the most profligate man of his age, who by his profligacy, as much as by his frequent misconduct, rendered irreparable injury to the cause which he intended to serve, retired to Spain after the ruin of that cause, and there ended his days as a Dominican Friar. If there be any record of him in the Chronicles of the Order, the account ought to be curious at least, if not edifying. But it is rather (for his own sake) to be hoped than supposed that he did not hate and despise the follies and the frauds of the fraternity into which he had entered more heartily than the pomps and vanities of the world which he had left.
On the other hand wherever convents are among the institutions of the land, not to speak of those poor creatures who are thrust into them against their will, or with only a mockery of freedom in the choice,— it must often happen that persons enter them in some fit of disappointment, or resentment, or grief, and find themselves when the first bitterness of passion is past, imprisoned for life by their own rash but irremediable act and deed. The woman, who when untoward circumstances have prevented her from marrying the man she loves, marries one for whom she has no affection, is more likely (poor as her chance is) to find contentment and perhaps happiness, than if for the same cause she had thrown herself into a nunnery. Yet this latter is the course to which if she were a Roman Catholic, her thoughts would perhaps preferably at first have turned, and to which they would probably be directed by her confessor.
Men who are weary of the ways of the world, or disgusted with them, have more licence, as well as more resources than women. If they do not enter upon some dangerous path of duty, or commence wanderers, they may chuse for themselves an eccentric path, in which if their habits are not such as expose them to insult, or if their means are sufficient to secure them against it, they are not likely to be molested,—provided they have no relations whose interest it may be to apply for a statute of lunacy against them.
A gentleman of this description, well known in London towards the close of George the Second's reign by the name of Harry Bingley, came in the days of Dr. Dove to reside upon his estate in the parish of Bolton upon Derne, near Doncaster. He had figured as an orator and politician in coffee houses at the west end of the town, and enjoyed the sort of notoriety which it was then his ambition to obtain; but discovering with the Preacher that this was vanity and vexation of spirit, when it was either too late for him to enter upon domestic life, or his habits had unfitted him for it, he retired to his estate which with the house upon it he had let to a farmer; in that house he occupied two rooms, and there indulged his humour as he had done in London, though it had now taken a very different direction.
“Cousin-german to Idleness,” says Burton, is “nimia solitudo, too much solitariness. Divers are cast upon this rock for want of means; or out of a strong apprehension of some infirmity, disgrace, or through bashfulness, rudeness, simplicity, they cannot apply themselves to others company. Nullum solum infelici gratius solitudine, ubi nullus sit qui miseriam exprobret. This enforced solitariness takes place and produceth his effect soonest in such as have spent their time, jovially peradventure, in all honest recreations, in good company, in some great family, or populous city; and are upon a sudden confined to a desert country cottage far off, restrained of their liberty and barred from their ordinary associates. Solitariness is very irksome to such, most tedious, and a sudden cause of great inconvenience.”
The change in Bingley's life was as great and sudden as that which the Anatomist of Melancholy has here described; but it led to no bodily disease nor to any tangible malady. His property was worth about fourteen hundred a year. He kept no servant, and no company; and he lived upon water-gruel and celery, except at harvest time, when he regaled himself with sparrow pies, made of the young birds just fledged, for which he paid the poor inhabitants who caught them two pence a head. Probably he supposed that it was rendering the neighbourhood a service thus to rid it of what he considered both a nuisance and a delicacy. This was his only luxury; and his only business was to collect about a dozen boys and girls on Sundays, and hear them say their Catechism, and read a chapter in the New Testament, for which they received remuneration in the intelligible form of two pence each, but at the feasts and statutes, “most sweet guerdon, better than remuneration,” in the shape of sixpence. He stood godfather for several poor people's children, they were baptized by his surname; when they were of proper age he used to put them out as apprentices, and in his will he left each of them an hundred guineas to be paid when they reached the age of twenty-five if they were married, but not till they married; and if they reached the age of fifty without marrying, the legacy was then forfeited. There were two children for whom he stood godfather, but whose parents did not chuse that they should be named after him; he never took any notice of these children, nor did he bequeath them any thing; but to one of the others he left the greater part of his property.