I have met with a notion in Dryden's _Poems_, which reads very like a
blunder. It occurs in the "Spanish Friar," as follows:--
"There is a pleasure sure in being mad,
Which none but madmen know."
And again in this couplet:
"And frantic men in their mad actions show
A happiness, that none but madmen know;"
There is a description of madness to which all men are more or less
subject, and which Pascal alludes to in one of his "Pensées:"
"Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous, que ce serait être fou
par un autre tour de folie, que de ne pas être fou:"
or, as Boileau has it in the couplet:
"Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgré leurs soins,
Ne diffèrent, entre eux, que du plus ou du moins."