, that built his house upon the sand, than I
entertained for his more cautious neighbour; I grudged at the hard
censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent;
and--prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my
apprehension, somewhat _unfeminine_ wariness of their competitors--I
felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a _tendre_, for those five
thoughtless virgins--I have never made an acquaintance since, that
lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some
tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest
obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall
commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he
will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety which a
palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of
season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool
told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of
folly in his mixture, had pounds of much worse matter in his
composition. It is observed, that "the foolisher the fowl or
fish--woodcocks,--dotterels,--cod's-heads, &c., the finer the flesh
thereof," and what are commonly the world's received fools, but such
whereof the world is not worthy? and what have been some of the
kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darlings of absurdity,
minions of the goddess, and her white boys?--Reader, if you wrest my
words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are
the _April Fool_.

_Lamb._

WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS

We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for
fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us)
involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this
visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to
detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible
world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad
spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of
fitness, or proportion--of that which distinguishes the likely from
the palpable absurd--could they have to guide them in the rejection
or admission of any particular testimony?--that maidens pined away,
wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire--that
corn was lodged, and cattle lamed--that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic
revelry the oaks of the forest--or that spits and kettles only danced
a fearful-innocent vagary ab