1831.] The FoUy of Wisdom. 423 



" Thou dost innocentiy joy. 

 Nor does thy luxury destroy." 



If he be not this, the pleasant places of folly are not for him ; and he 

 must retreat again into that same Slough of Despond, which as much 

 encircles these happy regions as those so picturesquely described by 

 Bunyan. 



But it is not Folly alone that offers so much gladness. To repeat my 

 metaphor, all her halo partakes of the same tone. — Let us examine itj 

 part and parcel, as a lawyer would say. The very word has something 

 sympathetic in it. Folly ! Folly ! — it rings with a silver sound in the 

 ear, like a well-cast bell — and jogs on towards the heart, like the bur- 

 then of a merry song ; — and, indeed, the ending of all authentic verse 

 is but an imitation, or rather a trolling expansion of it. — FoU-loU-de-roll ! 

 — Who does not see, in a moment, whence this thou sand- times- repeated, 

 always- welcome cadence, dates its origin > Sir Philip Sidney well 

 remarks, in his Defence of Poetry, " I never heard the old song of 

 Piercy and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a 

 trumpet;" and that prince of Follyists, hight Sheridan, was fond of 

 saying that he would rather have written the ballad of Hosier's Ghost 

 than any piece of poetry in the language. Verily, there is great excel- 

 lence in a song ; — but ten-fold — yea, twenty-fold, is the excellence that 

 lies in the burthen of it. So much, then, for the word ! — Now for the 

 associations that that word produces. If there is one thing in the woi-ld 

 that has dear and touching associations attached to it, it is Folly. It 

 takes us back to childhood — to those delicious days when all was folly 

 and all was happiness. FoUy, the immaterial, resolves herself into a pic- 

 ture palpable to the senses ; she wears the shape of the tiny paper-boat, 

 and still more tiny sail, waiting for a breeze in the forest-pool ; — she 

 takes on herself the image of the schoolboy, climbing the tallest tree, 

 leaving the world fifty feet below him, and conjuring himself into a 

 Robinson Crusoe or a Lemuel Gulliver ; — or assuming the same progres- 

 sive fiction, " with a difference," she is a boy-Ca^sar, leading on a 

 Roman army of half-a-dozen playmates across a new Rubicon, so 

 christened for tlie occasion. Nor are these the only associations that 

 Folly has for her disciples. Not only with schoolboy-reveries, but with 

 " Love's young dream," is she rife. The fair-haired, blue-eyed maiden 

 of the valley comes back, almost to our corporeal senses, at her bidding ; 

 the wicked brunette, that laughed us into midsummer-madness, joins 

 the tlirong ; and each bright fairy of the spring of life, that tripped to 

 the wayward music of the heart, is once again revivified and made per- 

 sonal to the minfl. — These are the delights of Folly's associations ; — but 

 her recollections have joy-giving power too. They take us back to the 

 days of olden time ; they place before our eyes the court-fool, the Lord 

 Mayor's fool — party-coloured and coxcombical ; and can these strike 

 upon our memory without bringing with them gentle ladies, gallant 

 knights, love-sick troubadours, and fell magicians wound round with 

 necromantic charms? Or — quitting the general for the individual — 

 Folly's recollections give us back INIedora's tender-hearted fool, who 

 pined himself to atrophy for that his mistress died — honest, fine-faced 

 Will Somers, who yet lives on Holbein's canvas — Shakspeare's Touch- 

 stone, who equally lives in the poet's page — and Sancho Panza, the ne 

 plus ultra of the brotherhood, wlio, in eating, sneaking, proverbizing. 



