eterminate kind of relation and influence.

But I am weary of transcribing the delirious ravings of a poor
visionary, the craziest that has ever existed, or of pursuing them to
his descriptions of the state after death. I am checked also by other
considerations. For, although in forming a medical museum it is right
to collect specimens not only of natural but also of unnatural
productions and abortions, yet it is necessary to be cautious before
whom you show them: and amongst my readers there may happen to be some
in a crazy condition of nerves; and it would give me pain to think
that I had been the occasion of any mischief to them. Having warned
them however from the beginning, I am not responsible for anything
that may happen; and must desire that no person will lay at my door
the moon-calves which may chance to arise from any teeming fancy
impregnated by Mr. Swedenborg's revelations.

In conclusion I have to say that I have not interpolated my author's
dreams with any surreptitious ones of my own; but have laid a faithful
abstract before the economic reader, who might not be well pleased to
pay seven pounds sterling for a body of raving. I have indeed omitted
many circumstantial pictures of his intuitions, because they could
only have served to disturb the reader's slumber; and the confused
sense of his revelations I have now and then clothed in a more current
diction. But all the important features of the sketch I have preserved
in their native integrity.--And thus I return with some little shame
from my foolish labours, from which I shall draw this moral: That it
is often a very easy thing to act prudentially; but alas! too often
only after we have toiled to our prudence through a forest of
delusions.

SKETCH OF PROFESSOR WILSON.[43]

[_In a Letter to an American Gentleman._]

My dear L,--Among the _lions_ whom you missed by one accident or
another on your late travels in Europe, I observe that you recur to
none with so much regret as Professor Wilson; you dwell upon this one
disappointment as a personal misfortune; and perhaps with reason; for,
in the course of my life, I have met with no man of equally varied
accomplishments, or, upon the whole, so well entitled to be ranked
with that order of men distinguished by brilliant versatility and
ambidexterity--of which order we find such eminent models in
Alcibiades, in Caesar, in Crichton, in that of Servan recorded by
Sully, and in one or two Italians.