Don Juan.
Gentle Reader, we are lunatic!
Nay, do not be startled! Because we use the pronoun we, we do not mean to pronounce you insane. We is of the first person, and we would be the last person to venture a doubt of your perfect sanity. It would be libellous to do so, and we abhor lawsuits—in which we have other than a professional interest. We use a plural pronoun, but only because it is more fashionable and dignified so to do. We intend thereby to make a singular announcement merely. Therefore, don’t think it strange. Be not surprised, or yet offended. Nobody but ourself is included in the declaration.
Let us explain further. We fear lest we be misunderstood. We pray, therefore, do not imagine these presents to be a round-robin, signed by the denizens of Bedlam. Neither, being disabused of this notion, will you, if we are to be believed, count us as crazy, because we avow ourself to be lunatic. We are (saving the grammar, and the hastily expressed opinion of an irritable maiden aunt,) compos mentis. We wish not further to break down the old rule of the Common Law, that no man shall be permitted by his own plea to stultify himself. Of course, if we should be indicted for murder to-morrow, however innocent we might be of the charge, we should acknowledge the homicide, and plead insanity, monomania, or at any rate somnambulism, but only for the reasons that we should wish to be certain of an acquittal, and that we dread to do any thing which might subject us to the charge of eccentricity, and a departure from well established usages. But under ordinary circumstances we should resent the issuing of a commission de lunatico inquiriendo, as tetchily as the summoning of a coroner’s jury in our particular behalf. We sign our contracts without the intervention or advice of an overseer, and we should be vehemently opposed to a rule of the Court of Probate appointing a conservator over us. Neither Dr. Bell, nor yet Dr. Woodward, has ever had us under his especial charge—our head was never shaven but once, and then we were out of it, to be sure, hard sick with the yellow fever at Havana. Our waistcoats are crooked and curved as becometh our shape and the fashion, are conveniently provided with arm-holes, and the material, generally, is buff cashmere or white Marseilles. We possess a four-bladed pen-knife, given to us by a member of Congress, just before election, as a token of esteem, and this we usually carry in our trowsers pocket and use unrestrictedly and without offense, albeit the same has a whittling blade and we are Yankee bred. We have on our dressing-table two pairs of excellent Sheffield razors, and shave therewith daily, as a gentleman should; and it is upon these occasions only that we make mouths and grimaces at ourself in the glass, or rave and stump. We sleep in the third story, but the windows of our dormitory are not grated or barred, and are often left open o’nights. We need not tell our landlady when we intend a sudden and brief absence, lest, perchance, before our return, the ponds be dredged for our body, our drawers searched for lost dying letters and commissions, incoherently written, or that the newspapers record a mysterious disappearance, and insert, on our behalf, a premature obituary notice, illustrated by misquotations from Shakspeare and the Scriptures. We have never supposed ourself to be the inventor of perpetual motion, or of a practically useful rotary steam-engine. We lay no claim to the British crown; do not confound our identity with that of King David, or Lord Wellington, or Napoleon Bonaparte, uncle or nephew; have no particular penchant for red chalk, beads, belts, bits of looking-glass, scrap-tin, or feathers; never adorn ourselves with wreaths of straw, and are caught sans culotte, only when having been out late over night, our privacy, to our unspeakable confusion, is suddenly invaded by the unconscious chamber-maid, as we are leisurely dressing for a late breakfast, and sadly ruminating on the folly of protracted festivities and the mutability of the temper of landladies—our friends don’t expect us to whoop at the table, and if, perchance, we handle the carving-knife, they exhibit no more of nervous agitation and alarm, than is the natural result, under the circumstances, of a well-grounded opinion that gravy shows better on platters than on plaits. Indeed, we have never had any provocation to go crazy—we never inherited any thing, not even an eccentric tendency. We have never lost a fortune for the best of all reasons. We have never been concerned in land or city lot speculations. We have never drawn a prize in a lottery; have never had an attack of the delirium tremens, nor have we been crossed in hopeless love. We have neither much learning or great care; have never had a coup de soleil, or a blow on the head, or a brain fever. Our caput is sound as a nut, thank God; and thick withal, as becomes a respectable citizen and burgess.
In fine, we are not mad, most gentle reader, in any sense of the term; on the contrary, with all modesty, we fully believe ourself to be a very sane, very good-natured, very staid, very commonplace, most inveterate old bachelor, sleeping nightly on the third floor, and dining daily at the public table of a very quiet inn, as we before hinted.
But, that the moon exercises an influence over our imagination, we cannot deny; and this, saith that learned lexicographer, Dr. John Walker, it is to be lunatic.
There are some people in and of the world, so stolid, so matter-of-fact, so very commonplace, so unimaginative, so void of all sense of the beautiful, so much of the earth, earthy, as to look upon the moon—nay, though—as never to look upon the moon, except by accident, or to judge of the prospect of the weather—as to consider the moon then, to amend our phrase, only as the earth’s satellite, a lesser light, a mere useful appendage to our mundane sphere, made only to regulate the time of high water at Greenwich, to save the corporation too great expense for gas, and to obviate a larger consumption of oil in lanterns and carriage-lamps; in fine, a thing of mere Paine-ful necessity. Such people value the heavenly bodies as children do pennies, according to their relative brightness; and so, in comparison with the sun, estimate the moon lightly, and the stars as of small account. They are more unsusceptible to gentle influences than the brutes.
We’d rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such a rum’un.
Gentle reader, it may be that you are lunatic yourself! Most fervently hoping that this be so—in fine, taking it for granted—our presumption, for an obvious reason, grows apace—we shall seek to hold communion with you of the moon. Not, however, touching on those tedious topics which engage the attention of mere astronomers and philosophers. We leave the pursuit of such shadows to the shade of Sir William Herschel, now probably resident on its private estate in Uranus, to Professor Nichols, and to Tom Dick, and—that is to say, to that man of big figures and small means, the Rev. Thomas Dick.