e,
and his furious attacks on Sir Isaac Newton, like Plato's suppers,
refreshed us not only for that day but whenever they recurred to us;
and we were both grieved when we heard some time afterwards from a
Cambridge man that he had met our clever friend in a stage coach under
the care of a brutal keeper.--Such a madness, if any, was the madness
of Walking Stewart; his health was perfect; his spirits as light and
ebullient as the spirits of a bird in springtime; and his mind
unagitated by painful thoughts, and at peace with itself. Hence, if he
was not an amusing companion, it was because the philosophic direction
of his thoughts made him something more. Of anecdotes and matters of
fact he was not communicative; of all that he had seen in the vast
compass of his travels he never availed himself in conversation. I do
not remember at this moment that he ever once alluded to his own
travels in his intercourse with me except for the purpose of weighing
down by a statement grounded on his own great personal experience an
opposite statement of many hasty and misjudging travellers which he
thought injurious to human nature; the statement was this, that in all
his countless rencontres with uncivilized tribes he had never met with
any so ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless
man who was able to make them understand that he threw himself upon
their hospitality and forbearance.

On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary; he had seen and
suffered much amongst men; yet not too much, or so as to dull the
genial tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind
was a mirror of the sentient universe.--The whole mighty vision that
had fleeted before his eyes in this world,--the armies of Hyder-Ali
and his son with oriental and barbaric pageantry,--the civic grandeur
of England, the great deserts of Asia and America,--the vast capitals
of Europe,--London with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and
flow of its "mighty heart,"--Paris shaken by the fierce torments of
revolutionary convulsions, the silence of Lapland, and the solitary
forests of Canada, with the swarming life of the torrid zone, together
with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow, that he
had participated by sympathy--lay like a map beneath him, as if
eternally co-present to his view; so that, in the contemplation of the
prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the parts, or occupy
his mind with det