But take the ample glorious meed,
To letter'd elegance decreed,
When Britain's mindful voice shall bend,
And with her own thy honours blend,
As she from thy kind hands receives
Her titles drawn on Glory's leaves,
And back reflects them on thy name,
Till time shall love thy mounting fame.
Thus was Leland, like the melancholic, withdrawn entirely into the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 a
series of volumes from the fragments; but the "Britannia" of Camden,
the "London" of Stowe, and the "Chronicles" of Holinshed, are only a
few of those public works whose waters silently welled from the spring
of Leland's genius; and that nothing might be wanting to preserve some
relic of that fine imagination which was always working in his poetic
soul, his own description of his learned journey over the kingdom was
a spark, which, falling into the inflammable mind of a poet, produced
the singular and patriotic poem of the "Polyolbion" of Drayton. Thus
the genius of Leland has come to us diffused through a variety of
other men's; and what he intended to produce it has required many to
perform.
A singular inscription, in which Leland speaks of himself, in the
style he was accustomed to use, and which Weever tells us was affixed
to his monument, as he had heard by tradition, was probably a relic
snatched from his general wreck--for it could not with propriety have
been composed after his death.[125]
Quantum Rhenano debet Germania docto
Tantum debebit terra Britanna mihi.
Ille suae gentis ritus et nomina prisca
AEstivo fecit lucidiora die.
Ipse antiquarum rerum quoque magnus amator
Ornabo patriae lumina clara meae.
Quae cum prodierint niveis inscripta tabellis,
Tum testes nostrae sedulitatis erunt.