Now, reader, there you see the evil consequence of a man who is a little of a screw in point of temper, living in the country.  Most reasonable men would never have discerned any insult in Mr. Murray’s request:  but even if such a one had thought it a shade too authoritatively expressed, he would, if he had lived in town, gone out to the crowded street, gone down to his club, and in half an hour have entirely forgotten the little disagreeable impression.  But a touchy man, dwelling in the country, gets the irritative letter by the morning’s post, is worried by it all the forenoon, and goes out and broods on the offence through all his solitary afternoon walk,—­a walk in which he does not see a face, perhaps, and certainly does not exchange a sentence with any human being whose presence is energetic enough to turn the current of thought into a healthier direction.  And so, by the evening he has got the little offence into the point of view in which it looks most offensive:  he is in a rage at being asked to do his best in writing anything for a six-shilling publication.  Why on earth not do so?  Is not the mind unsoundly sensitive that finds an offence in a request like that?  My brilliant brethren who write for Fraser, don’t you put your whole strength to articles to be published in a periodical that sells for half-a-crown?

You could not have warranted manly Samuel Johnson sound, on the points of prejudice and bigotry.  There was something unsound in that unreasoning hatred of everything Scotch.  Rousseau was altogether a screw.  He was mentally lame, broken-winded, a shyer, a kicker, a jibber, a biter:  he would do anything but run right on and do his duty.  Shelley was a notorious screw.  I should say, indeed, that his unsoundness passed the limit of practical sanity, and that on certain points he was unquestionably mad.  You could not have warranted Keats sound.  You could not deny the presence of a little perverse twist even in the noble mind and heart of the great Sir Charles Napier.  The great Emperor Napoleon was cracky, if not cracked, on various points.  There was unsoundness in his strange belief in his Fate.  Neither Bacon nor Newton was entirely sound.  But the mention of Newton suggests to me the single specimen of human kind who might stand even before him:  and reminds me that Shakspeare was as sound as any mortal ean be.  Any defect in him extends no farther than to his taste:  and possibly where we should differ from him, he is right and we are wrong.  You could not say that Shakspeare was mentally a screw.  The noblest of all genius is sober and reasonable:  it is among geniuses of the second order that you find something so warped, so eccentric, so abnormal, as to come up to our idea of a screw.  Sir Walter Scott was sound:  save perhaps in the matter of his veneration for George iv., and of his desire to take rank as one of the country gentlemen of Roxburghshire.