is slight and every-day
character.

Man is a rational being. It is by this particular that he is eminently
distinguished from the brute creation. He collects premises and deduces
conclusions. He enters into systems of thinking, and combines systems of
action, which he pursues from day to day, and from year to year. It is
by this feature in his constitution that he becomes emphatically the
subject of history, of poetry and fiction. It is by this that he is
raised above the other inhabitants of the globe of earth, and that the
individuals of our race are made the partners of "gods, and men like
gods."

But our nature, beside this, has another section. We start occasionally
ten thousand miles awry. We resign the sceptre of reason, and the high
dignity that belongs to us as beings of a superior species; and, without
authority derived to us from any system of thinking, even without the
scheme of gratifying any vehement and uncontrolable passion, we are
impelled to do, or at least feel ourselves excited to do, something
disordinate and strange. It seems as if we had a spring within us, that
found the perpetual restraint of being wise and sober insupportable.
We long to be something, or to do something, sudden and unexpected,
to throw the furniture of our apartment out at window, or, when we are
leaving a place of worship, in which perhaps the most solemn feelings
of our nature have been excited, to push the grave person that is
just before us, from the top of the stairs to the bottom. A thousand
absurdities, wild and extravagant vagaries, come into our heads, and we
are only restrained from perpetrating them by the fear, that we may be
subjected to the treatment appropriated to the insane, or may perhaps be
made amenable to the criminal laws of our country.

A story occurs to me, which I learned from the late Dr. Parr at Hatton,
that may not unhappily illustrate the point I am endeavouring to
explain.

Dr. Samuel Clarke, rector of St. James's, Westminster, the especial
friend of Sir Isaac Newton, the distinguished editor of the poems of
Homer, and author of the Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of
God, was one day summoned from his study, to receive two visitors in
the parlour. When he came downstairs, and entered the room, he saw
a foreigner, who by his air seemed to be a person of distinction, a
professor perhaps of some university on the continent; and an alderman
of London, a relation of the doctor, who had c