c, withdrawn entirely into the
world of his own ideas; his imagination delighting in reveries, while
his industry was exhausting itself in labour. His manners were not
free from haughtiness,--his meagre and expressive physiognomy
indicates the melancholy and the majesty of his mind; it was not old
age, but the premature wrinkles of those nightly labours he has
himself recorded. All these characteristics are so strongly marked in
the bust of Leland, that Lavater had triumphed had he studied
it.[124]

Labour had been long felt as voluptuousness by Leland; and this is
among the Calamities of Literature, and it is so with all those
studies which deeply busy the intellect and the fancy. There is a
poignant delight in study, often subversive of human happiness. Men of
genius, from their ideal state, drop into the cold formalities of
society, to encounter its evils, its disappointments, its neglect, and
perhaps its persecutions. When such minds discover the world will only
become a friend on its own terms, then the cup of their wrath
overflows; the learned grow morose, and the witty sarcastic; but more
indelible emotions in a highly-excited imagination often produce those
delusions, which Darwin calls hallucinations, and which sometimes
terminate in mania. The haughtiness, the melancholy, and the aspiring
genius of Leland, were tending to a disordered intellect. Incipient
insanity is a mote floating in the understanding, escaping all
observation, when the mind is capable of observing itself, but seems a
constituent part of the mind itself when that is completely covered
with its cloud.

Leland did not reach even the maturity of life, the period at which
his stupendous works were to be executed. He was seized by frenzy. The
causes of his insanity were never known. The Papists declared he went
mad because he had embraced the new religion; his malicious rival
Polydore Vergil, because he had promised what he could not perform;
duller prosaists because his poetical turn had made him conceited. The
grief and melancholy of a fine genius, and perhaps an irregular
pension, his enemies have not noticed.

The ruins of Leland's mind were viewed in his library; volumes on
volumes stupendously heaped together, and masses of notes scattered
here and there; all the vestiges of his genius, and its distraction.
His collections were seized on by honest and dishonest hands; many
were treasured, but some were stolen. Hearne zealously arranged