The condition of the lowest class of these wretched beings is indeed that of idiocy; their intellectual power being little more than the mental blank which would mark the acephalous, or brainless monsters, could such abortions attain the age of maturity. It is mere animal life, with the very faintest stamp of intelligence.
The Cretin is from four to five feet high, cadaverous, flabby, the head immensely out of proportion, the skin studded with livid eruptions, the eyes blear and squinting, the lips slavering, the limbs weak and crooked; and (like the Stulbings of Swift) the senses are imperfect, the hearing and speech often absolutely lost,—the expression being that of a fool or a satyr. And dissection demonstrates the frequent causes of all this; for, in the skull of these beings, we often find a bluish jelly, instead of healthy brain. This diseased pulp is thus the source of both animal and intellectual apathy. The idiot will often seem insensible to pain, while his flesh is burning; and objects or subjects do not cause sufficient impression on this pulpy brain to produce their image, so that the being may almost live without a sense.
Cast. This is a dreary, but, I suppose, a faithful picture, and shows us one of those impressive contrasts which nature is fraught with. The Cretin dwarf amidst the gigantic sublimity of the Alps; the lava stream rolling over the chestnut groves of Valombrosa; the malaria that steams up from the Pontine even to Albano; the murky sulphur cloud that floats over Avernus, and the Solfaterra; and the poison-snake creeping among the honied flowers and purple festoons which gild the prairies and interlace the forests of Columbia, show us how intimately are blended the lights and shadows of creation. Yet Evelyn will let me ask him if there are not many beautiful stories, which we may have deemed the creation of poesy, proving that idiotism is not always definite and permanent. I ought to blush while I recite them. The romance of Cymon and Iphigenia is not a mere fable. I have heard a story of a youth who was an idiot to his 17th year. At this time he saw a beautiful girl, and instantly felt deep and devoted love for her; and became, from this almost divine influence, as acute in intellect as his playmates.
Astr. And what writeth the quaint Anatomist of Melancholy?—“We read in the lives of the Fathers a story of a child that was brought up in the wilderness from his infancy by an old hermite. Now come to man’s estate, he saw by chance two comely women wandering in the woods. He asked the old man what creatures they were. He told him fayries. After a while talking obiter, the hermite demanded of him which was the pleasantest sight that he ever saw in his life? He readily replied, the two fayries he espied in the wilderness. So that without doubt there is some secret loadstone in a beautiful woman, a magnetique power.”
Ida. We do not hold your gallantry lightly, Astrophel; there is some hope of your conversion.
Ev. That mind is termed weak, where there is a want of the power of fixing the attention to one object, a wandering of the imaginative faculty. A train of ideas arises, between the links of which there is some remote relation; but its beginning and end may appear so dissonant, that the absent person will fail to recognize the connexion, until, by an effort to retrace the steps of thought, the mystery is developed.
Ida. The subjects of this form of reverie are, I presume, the wool-gatherers of society, being “every thing by turns, and nothing long;” and often, like the dog in the fable, losing the substance while they grasp at the shadow; others employ their time by sitting
“Musing all alone,
Building castles in the air,”
forming plans and projecting schemes which shall fill men’s minds with wonder, and their own pockets with gold.