d not under other circumstances so
happily enjoy. And this is that comfortable apathy or insensibleness
which Cicero, in an epistle to his friend Atticus, wishes himself master
of, that he might the less take to heart those insufferable outrages
committed by the tyrannizing triumvirate, Lepidus, Antonius, and
Augustus. That Grecian likewise had a happy time of it, who was so
frantic as to sit a whole day in the empty theatre laughing, shouting,
and clapping his hands, as if he had really seen some pathetic tragedy
acted to the life, when indeed all was no more than the strength of
imagination, and the efforts of delusion, while in all other respects
the same person behaved himself very discreetly was,

Sweet to his friends, to his wife, obliging, kind,
And so averse from a revengeful mind,
That had his men unsealed his bottled wine,
He would not fret, nor doggedly repine.

And when by a course of physic he was recovered from this frenzy, he
looked upon his cure so far from a kindness, that he thus reasons the
case with his friends:

This remedy, my friends, is worse i' th' main
Than the disease, the cure augments the pain;
My only hope is a relapse again,

And certainly they were the more mad of the two who endeavoured to
bereave him of so pleasing a delirium, and recall all the aches of his
head by dispelling the mists of his brain.

[Illustration: 169]

[Illustration: 173-174]

I have not yet determined whether it be proper to include all the
defects of sense and understanding under the common genius of madness.
For if anyone be so short-sighted as to take a mule for an ass, or so
shallowpated as to admire a paltry ballad for an elegant poem, he is not
thereupon immediately censured as mad. But if anyone let not only his
senses but his judgment be imposed upon in the most ordinary common
concerns, he shall come under the scandal of being thought next door to
a madman. As suppose any one should hear an ass bray, and should take it
for ravishing music; or if any one, born a beggar, should fancy himself
as great as a prince, or the like. But this sort of madness, if (as is
most usual) it be accompanied with pleasure, brings a great satisfaction
both to those who are possessed with it themselves, and those who deride
it in others, though they are not both equally frantic. And this species
of madness is of larger extent than the world commonly imagines. Thus
the whole tribe of m