In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough removed from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting—­an article. In articulo mortis, thought I; but it is something hard—­and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me.

In the “Sanity of True Genius” Elia set out to controvert the idea expressed by Dryden in his best remembered line—­

    “Great wits to madness nearly are allied,”

and does so in a most convincing manner if, with him, we understand by the greatness of wit poetic talent.  As he says:  “It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare.”

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet.  But the true poet dreams being awake.  He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it.  In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths.  He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated.  He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos “and old night.”  Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a “human mind untuned,” he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon; neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that—­never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so—­he has his better genius whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels; or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions.  Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it.

“Captain Jackson” is an unforgettable picture of a poor man who would not be poor; his manners made a plated spoon appear as silver sugar-tongs, a homely bench a sofa, and so on.  As Elia concludes: 

There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances.  To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not always be discommendable.  Tibbs and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration than contempt.  But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson.

With the next essay of this collection, that on “The Superannuated Man,” we come to one of the most notable of the series of Elia’s transmutations of matters of private experience into precious literature.  The paper is as autobiographic as any of his letters:  some slight changes—­as of the East India House to the name of a city firm—­are made, but for the rest it is a record of his retirement with a revelation of the feelings attendant upon the change from having to go daily to an office for thirty-six years to being suddenly free: