84 GENIUS AND MENTAL DISEASE. 
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 illustrative 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 
Schumann, the eminent composer of music ; and Blake, 
to whom the realities 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 
loneliness. Cowper was timid and morbid, and agonized 
under religious melancholy and suicidal impulse. The 
insane temperament was also definitely marked in 
Comte, the oracle of the ‘* Positive Philosophy” ; in 
Tasso, whose melancholy fate gave to Goethe the oppor- 
tunity to picture a psychological drama, wherein char- 
acter is revealed under the glow of ‘‘ poetic furor,’ and 
also, at times, oppressed by morbid fears and delusive 
visions ; in Swedenborg, whose prolific mind teemed 
with fancies and speculations, contradictions and absur- 
dities, which can only be explained on the theory of a 
mind diseased ; and in Charles Lamb, whose ‘‘ diluted 
insanity ’’ cast an enduring shadow over his life. 
The facts, as I view them, make me dissent from the 
- theory that a diseased brain is the physical substratum 
of genius, or that the possession of such exalted mental 
endowments ‘‘carries with it special liabilities to the 
action of the strong disintegrating forces which environ 
us.’ ‘‘A large genius,” says Dr. Maudsley, ‘‘is plain- 
ly not in the least akin to madness; but between these 
