Fouche, “is full of poniards.”  The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his food.  Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman’s Tale illustrates the Statute Hen.  V. Chap. 4, against Alchemy.  I saw a man who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived from the devotion to musical concerts.  A freemason, not long since, set out to explain to this country, that the principal cause of the success of General Washington was the aid he derived from the freemasons.

But, worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system.  The pest of society is egotists.  There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists.  ’Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions.  In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round and continues to spin slowly on one spot.  Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?  The man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world.  It is a tendency in all minds.  One of its annoying forms is a craving for sympathy.  The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them.  They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from the bystanders; as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw attention.

This distemper is the scourge of talent,—­of artists, inventors, and philosophers.  Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting their act or word aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing it is.  Beware of the man who says, “I am on the eve of a revelation!” It is speedily punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to humor it, and, by treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower selfism, and exclude him from the great world of God’s cheerful fallible men and women.  Let us rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable.  Religious literature has eminent examples; and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in Nature which it subserves,—­such as we see in the sexual attraction.  The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity, that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder.  So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.