s to it. But through the perversity
of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a
single idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' child
of thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to
the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no
satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the
collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus
unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?

I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see
certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of
the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without
laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_)
and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret
I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be
implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body
and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm
w