78 GENIUS AND MENTAL DISEASE. 
Eliot sensitive and dependent ; Hawthorne shy and 
modest ; Wordsworth simple-hearted yet full of con- 
ceit; and Ampére absent-minded and unpractical. Thus 
might I show certain peculiarities which belong to the 
personal mental outfit of almost every one whose indi- 
viduality is sufficiently marked to make him worthy of 
notice ; but these peculiarities or eccentricities are not 
essentially morbid, neither do they give affirmative evi- 
dence that genius is related to madness. Such peculi- 
arities belong to. all orders of mind—the humble as well 
as the exalted—and cannot, therefore, have an exclusive 
application. . 
Add to the personal eccentricities of Rope, Byron, 
Johnson, Carlyle and Swift, the temper which at times 
became in them extravagant rage, and the proof is yet no 
Stronger that genius and insanity are but different types 
of mental disease ; for passion and appetite are, in all — 
their forms, expressions of organic life, and common to 
humanity, and, therefore, as universal factors, they can 
not be dissociated and made to bear witness either for or 
against the subject before us. It has already been ad- 
mitted that eccentricities of character imply a want of 
mental poise or equilibium, which is even more apparent 
in the extravagant passions which at times hold individ- 
uals under despotic control, and often indicate decided 
moral obliquity. This I do not deny; but yet affirm 
that the violent passion at times observed in one of ex- 
alted powers of mind is no more evidence in favor of the 
kinship between these powers and mental disease, than 
is the same passion, when displayed in a low and vulgar 
mind, proof that stupidity is a congener of madness. 
Mr. Madden is quite as justified in asserting that ‘‘ the 
maladies of genius have their main source in dyspepsia,”’ 
or I in affirming that, because some eminent men have 
been physically puny and ill-formed, therefore their 
