t line;
Let him swim to the north, let him swim to the south,
The Abbot will carry my hook in his mouth!"

The Abbot had preached for many years
With as clear articulation
As ever was heard in the House of Peers
Against Emancipation;
His words had made battalions quake,
Had roused the zeal of martyrs,
Had kept the Court an hour awake
And the King himself three quarters:
But ever from that hour, 'tis said,
He stammered and he stuttered
As if an axe went through his head
With every word he uttered.
He stuttered o'er blessing, he stuttered o'er ban,
He stuttered, drunk or dry;
And none but he and the Fisherman
Could tell the reason why!

LXIV. MAD--QUITE MAD.

Originally published in the _Morning Post_ for 1834; afterwards
included in his _Essays_.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied.--_Dryden_.

It has frequently been observed that genius and madness are nearly
allied; that very great talents are seldom found unaccompanied by a
touch of insanity, and that there are few Bedlamites who will not,
upon a close examination, display symptoms of a powerful, though ruined
intellect. According to this hypothesis, the flowers of Parnassus must
be blended with the drugs of Anticyra; and the man who feels himself to
be in possession of very brilliant wits may conclude that he is within
an ace of running out of them. Whether this be true or false, we are
not at present disposed to contradict the assertion. What we wish to
notice is the pains which many young men take to qualify themselves for
Bedlam, by hiding a good, sober, gentlemanlike understanding beneath an
assumption of thoughtlessness and whim. It is the received opinion
among many that a man's talents and abilities are to be rated by the
quantity of nonsense he utters per diem, and the number of follies he
runs into per annum. Against this idea we must enter our protest; if we
concede that every real genius is more or less a madman, we must not be
supposed to allow that every sham madman is more or less a genius.

In the days of our ancestors, the hot-blooded youth who threw away his
fortune at twenty-one, his character at twenty-two, and his life at
twenty-three, was termed "a good fellow", "an honest fellow", "nobody's
enemy but his own". In our time the name is altered; and the
fashionable who squanders his father's estate, or murders his best
friend--who breaks his wife's heart a