472 Essay on
��courses with energy on the government of the passions, and on a sudden, when Death deprives him of his daughter, forgets all his maxims of wisdom and the eloquence that adorned them, yielding to the stroke of affliction with all the vehemence of the bitterest anguish. It is by pictures of life, and profound moral reflection, that expectation is engaged and gratified throughout the work. The History of the Mad Astronomer, who imagines that, for five years, he possessed the regulation of the weather, and that the sun passed from tropic to tropic by his direction, represents in striking colours the sad effects of a distempered imagination. It becomes the more affecting, when we recollect that it proceeds from one, who lived in fear of the same dreadful visitation ; from one who says emphatically, * Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the un certain continuance of reason V The enquiry into the cause of madness, and the dangerous prevalence of imagination, till, in time, some particular train of ideas fixes the attention, and the mind recurs constantly to the favourite conception, is carried on in a strain of acute observation ; but it leaves us room to think, that the author was transcribing from his own apprehensions. The discourse on the nature of the soul gives us all that philo sophy knows, not without a tincture of superstition 2 . It is remarkable that the vanity of human pursuits was, about the same time, the subject that employed both Johnson and Voltaire 3 ; but Candide is the work of a lively imagination, and Rasselas, with all its splendour of eloquence, exhibits a gloomy picture. It should, however, be remembered, that the world has known the WEEPING as well as the LAUGHING philosopher.
The Dictionary does not properly fall within the province of this essay 4 . The preface, however, will be found in this
1 Rasselas, ch. 43 ; Life, i. 66. morous definitions, adds that John-
2 Rasselas, ch. 48. There is not a son said to him : ' You know, Sir, single line in which a believer in the Lord Gower forsook the old Jacobite immortality of the soul would find interest. When I came to the word this ' tincture.' Renegado, after telling that it meant
3 Life, i. 342 ; vi. Addenda, p. 29 ; " one who deserts to the enemy, a Letters, i. 79. revolter," I added, Sometimes we
4 Boswell, after quoting some hu- say a GOWER. Thus it went to the
edition
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