g, sweat, and fasting; and in
his latter days he never tastes one mouthful of delight, but is
always stingy, poor, dejected, melancholy, burthensome to himself, and
unwelcome to others, pale, lean, thin-jawed, sickly, contracting by his
sedentariness such hurtful distempers as bring him to an untimely death,
like roses plucked before they shatter. Thus have you, the draught of a
wise man's happiness, more the object of a commiserating pity, than of
an ambitioning envy.

But now again come the croaking Stoics, and tell me in mood and figure,
that nothing is more miserable than the being mad: but the being a fool
is the being mad, therefore there is nothing more miserable than the
being a fool. Alas, this is but a fallacy, the discovery whereof solves
the force of the whole syllogism. Well then, they argue subtlety, 'tis
true; but as Socrates in Plato makes two Venuses and two Cupids, and
shews how their actions and properties ought not to be confounded;
so these disputants, if they had not been mad themselves, should have
distinguished between a double madness in others: and there is certainly
a great difference in the nature as well as in the degrees of them, and
they are not both equally scandalous: for Horace seems to take delight
in one sort, when he says:--

_Does welcome frenzy make me thus mistake?_

And Plato in his Phaedon ranks the madness of poets, of prophets, and of
lovers among those properties which conduce to a happy life. And Virgil,
in the sixth AEneid, gives this epithet to his industrious AEneas:--

_If you will proceed to these your mad attempts._

And indeed there is a two-fold sort of madness; the one that which the
furies bring from hell; those that are herewith possessed are hurried on
to wars and contentions, by an inexhaustible thirst of power and
riches, inflamed to some infamous and unlawful lust, enraged to act the
parricide, seduced to become guilty of incest, sacrilege, or some
other of those crimson-dyed crimes; or, finally, to be so pricked in
conscience as to be lashed and stung with the whips and snakes of grief
and remorse. But there is another sort of madness that proceeds from
Folly, so far from being any way injurious or distasteful that it is
thoroughly good and desirable; and this happens when by a harmless
mistake in the judgment of things the mind is freed from those cares
which would otherwise gratingly afflict it, and smoothed over with
a content and satisfaction it coul