To sum up:  let it be admitted that very noble work has been turned off by minds in so far unhinged.  It is not merely that great wits are to madness near allied, it is that great wits are sometimes actually in part mad.  Madness is a matter of degree.  The slightest departure from the normal and healthy action of the mind is an approximation to it.  Every mind is a little unsound; but you don’t talk of insanity till the un.-oundness becomes very glaring, and unfits for the duty of life.  Just as almost every horse is a little lame:  one leg steps a hair-breadth shorter than the other, or is a thought less muscular, or the hoof is a shade too sensitive; but you don’t talk of lameness till the creature’s head begins to go up and down, or till it plainly shrinks from putting its foot to the ground.  Southey’s wrath about the six-shilling Review, and his brooding on Murray’s slight offence, was a step in the direction of marked delusion such as conveys a man to Harwell or Morningside.  And the sensitive, imaginative nature, which goes to the production of some of the human mind’s best productions, is prone to such little deviations from that which is strictly sensible and right.  You do not think, gay young readers, what poor unhappy half-cracked creatures may have written the pages which thrill you or amuse you; or painted the picture before which you pause so long.  I know hardly any person who ever published anything; but I have sometimes thought that I should like to see assembled in one chamber, on the first of any month, all the men and women who wrote all the articles in all the magazines for that month.  Some of them doubtless would be very much like other people; but many would certainly be very odd-looking and odd-tempered samples of humankind.  The history of some would be commonplace enough, but that of many would be very curious.  A great many readers, I dare say, would like to stand in a gallery, and look at the queer individuals assembled below.  Magazine articles, of course, are not (speaking generally) specimens of the highest order of literature; but still, some experience, some thought, some observation, have gone to produce even them.  And it is unquestionably out of deep sorrow, out of the travail of heart and nature, that the finest and noblest of all human thoughts have come.

As for the ordinary task-work of life, it must, beyond all question, be generally done by screws,—­that is, by folk whose mental organization is unsound on some point.  Vain people, obstinate people, silly people, evil-foreboding people, touchy people, twaddling people, carry on the work-day world.  Not that it would be giving a fair account of them to describe them thus, and leave the impression that such are their essential characteristics.  They are all that has been said; but there is in most a good substratum of practical sense; and they do fairly, or even remarkably well, the particular thing which it is their business in this life to do.  When Mr. Carlyle said that