The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 408 pages of information about The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4.

The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 408 pages of information about The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4.

This Caprichio, Sir Humourous, hee cometh to me to be cured.  I counsel marriage with his mistresse, according to Hippocrates his method, together with milk-diet, herbs, aloes, and wild parsley, good in such cases, though Avicenna preferreth some sorts of wild fowl, teals, widgeons, beccaficos, which men in Sussex eat.  He flies out in a passion, ho! ho; and falls to calling me names, dizzard, ass, lunatic, moper, Bedlamite, Pseudo-Democritus.  I smile in his face, bidding him be patient, tranquil, to no purpose, he still rages:  I think this man must fetch his remedies from Utopia, Fairy Land, Islands in the Moone, &c.

EXTRACT II.

* * * * * Much disputacyons of fierce wits amongst themselves, in logomachies, subtile controversies, many dry blows given on either side, contentions of learned men, or such as would be so thought, as Bodinus de Periodis saith of such an one, arrident amici ridet mundus, in English, this man his cronies they cocker him up, they flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, meanwhile the world thinks him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist. * *

* * * Philosophy running mad, madness philosophizing, much idle-learned inquiries, what truth is? and no issue, fruit, of all these noises, only huge books are written, and who is the wiser? * * * * * Men sitting in the Doctor’s chair, we marvel how they got there being homines intellectus pulverulenti as Trincauellius notes; they care not so they may raise a dust to smother the eyes of their oppugners; homines parvulissimi, as Lemnius, whom Alcuin herein taxeth of a crude Latinism; dwarfs, minims, the least little men, these spend their time, and it is odds but they lose their time and wits too into the bargain, chasing of nimble and retiring Truth:  Her they prosecute, her still they worship, libant, they make libations, spilling the wine as those old Romans in their sacrificials, Cerealia, May games: Truth is the game all these hunt after, to the extreme perturbacyon and drying up of the moistures humidum radicale exsiccant, as Galen, in his counsel to one of these wear-wits, brain-moppers, spunges saith. * * * and for all this nunquam metam attingunt, and how should they? they bowle awry, shooting beside the marke; whereas it should appear, that Truth absolute on this planet of ours is scarcely to be found, but in her stede Queene Opinion predominates, governs, whose shifting and ever mutable Lampas, me seemeth, is man’s destinie to follow, she praecurseth, she guideth him, before his uncapable eyes she frisketh her tender lights, which entertayne the child-man, untill what time his sight be strong to endure the vision of Very Truth, which is in the heavens, the vision beatifical, as Anianus expounds in his argument against certain mad wits which helde God to be corporeous; these were dizzards,

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The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.