their destination, he
feared that the English language might itself have mouldered away.
"No!" I said, "_that_ was not probable; considering its extensive
diffusion, and that it was now transplanted into all the continents of
our planet, I would back the English language against any other on
earth." His own persuasion, however, was that the Latin was destined
to survive all other languages; it was to be the eternal as well as
the universal language; and his desire was that I would translate his
works, or some part of them into that language.[46] This I promised;
and I seriously designed at some leisure hour to translate into Latin
a selection of passages which should embody an abstract of his
philosophy. This would have been doing a service to all those who
might wish to see a digest of his peculiar opinions cleared from the
perplexities of his peculiar diction and brought into a narrow compass
from the great number of volumes through which they are at present
dispersed. However, like many another plan of mine, it went
unexecuted.

[Footnote 46: I was not aware until the moment of writing this passage
that Walking Stewart had publicly made this request three years after
making it to myself: opening the Harp of Apollo, I have just now
accidentally stumbled on the following passage, "This stupendous work
is destined, I fear, to meet a worse fate than the Aloe, which as soon
as it blossoms loses its stalk. This first blossom of reason is
threatened with the loss of both its stalk and its soil; for, if the
revolutionary tyrant should triumph, he would destroy all the English
books and energies of thought. I conjure my readers to translate this
work into Latin, and to bury it in the ground, communicating on their
death-beds only its place of concealment to men of nature."

From the title page of this work, by the way, I learn that the "7000th
year of Astronomical History" is taken from the Chinese tables, and
coincides (as I had supposed) with the year 1812 of our computation.]

On the whole, if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way
which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence--but rather
exalted them. The old maxim, indeed, that "Great wits to madness sure
are near allied," the maxim of Dryden and the popular maxim, I have
heard disputed by Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth, who maintain that
mad people are the dullest and most wearisome of all people. As a
body, I believe they are so. But I must