676 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



morning star, full of life and splendor and joy," and felt that, through 

 unbelief and passion, the props of stable government and morals were 

 being broken and destroyed. The "divine right of kings" was yet an 

 article of common faith, and he saw their sorrow, but heard not the 

 wail of anguish which ascended from the oppressed and starving peo- 

 ple. Rage against the lawless Parisian mob filled him, and in his 

 wrath he spoke as if envenomed hate had made him mad ; and he was 

 so adjudged, but only by those who differed from him. The inspira- 

 tion of his genius gave him the tongue of truth, and the penalty was 

 an assault upon his sanity. 



Then came the supreme sorrow of his life, the death of his son, and 

 in his grief he wrote : " The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one 

 of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me ; I 

 am stripped of my honors ; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate 

 on the earth. I am alone, I have none to meet my enemies in the 

 gate ; . . . I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have suc- 

 ceeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me 

 as posterity are in the place of ancestors." 



Because of the outward expressions of grief which were at times 

 his, as when his son's favorite horse came to him and put its head 

 upon his bosom, which caused Burke to cry aloud in his sorrow — be- 

 cause of such manifestations of grief, it is said Burke was mad. Ed- 

 ward Everett has well said : " If I were called upon to designate the 

 event or the period in Burke's life that would best sustain a charge of 

 insanity, it would not be when, in a gush of the holiest and purest 

 feeling that ever stirred the human heart, he wept aloud on the neck 

 of his dead son's favorite horse." As proof that his intellect was not 

 disordered, his " Letters on a Regicide Peace," written in 1796, a year 

 before his death, bear ample evidence, and are regarded, says John 

 Morley, " in some respects the most splendid of all his compositions. 

 . . . We hardly know where else to look either in Burke's own writ- 

 ings or elsewhere for such an exhibition of the rhetorical resources of 

 our language." 



That Burke had at times eccentricities and fleeting aberrations may 

 be true, but to call such a man insane, or to speak of him as illustra- 

 tive of the kinship between genius and madness, is to make sport of 

 facts and mockery of human thought. 



Notwithstanding the many names I thus take from the roll-call of 

 madness, there are, nevertheless, many gifted minds that have not 

 been absolved from this sad heritage, or been able to bear with calm 

 serenity the misfortunes and burdens of a weary life. Such was Schu- 

 mann, the eminent composer of music ; and Blake, to whom the reali- 

 ties of the world were but dissolving forms of his own consciousness ; 

 and Clare, who, when his melancholy was deepened by the neglect of 

 family and friends, wrote so plaintively of his own gloom and loneli- 

 ness. Cowper was timid and morbid, and agonized under religious 





