Mr. Stewart the traveller, commonly called "Walking Stewart," was a
man of very extraordinary genius. He has generally been treated by
those who have spoken of him in print as a madman. But this is a
mistake; and must have been founded chiefly on the titles of his
books. He was a man of fervid mind and of sublime aspirations; but he
was no madman; or, if he was, then I say that it is so far desirable
to be a madman. In 1798 or 1799, when I must have been about thirteen
years old, Walking Stewart was in Bath--where my family at that time
resided. He frequented the pump-room, and I believe all public
places--walking up and down, and dispersing his philosophic opinions
to the right and the left, like a Grecian philosopher. The first time
I saw him was at a concert in the Upper Rooms; he was pointed out to
me by one of my party as a very eccentric man who had walked over the
habitable globe. I remember that Madame Mara was at that moment
singing; and Walking Stewart, who was a true lover of music (as I
afterwards came to know), was hanging upon her notes like a bee upon a
jessamine flower. His countenance was striking, and expressed the
union of benignity with philosophic habits of thought. In such health
had his pedestrian exercises preserved him, connected with his
abstemious mode of living, that though he must at that time have been
considerably above forty, he did not look older than twenty-eight; at
least the face which remained upon my recollection for some years was
that of a young man. Nearly ten years afterwards I became acquainted
with him. During the interval I had picked up one of his works in
Bristol,--viz. his _Travels to discover the Source of Moral Motion_,
the second volume of which is entitled _The Apocalypse of Nature_. I
had been greatly impressed by the sound and original views which in
the first volume he had taken of the national characters throughout
Europe. In particular he was the first, and so far as I know the only
writer who had noticed the profound error of ascribing a phlegmatic
character to the English nation. "English phlegm" is the constant
expression of authors when contrasting the English with the French.
Now the truth is, that, beyond that of all other nations, it has a
substratum of profound passion; and, if we are to recur to the old
doctrine of temperaments, the English character must be classed not
under the _phlegmatic_ but under the _melancholic_ temperament; and
the French under the _sanguine_. The character of a nation may be
judged of in this particular by examining its idiomatic language. The
French, in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly bubbling up
from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings, have
appropriated all the phrases of passion to the service of trivial and
ordinary life; and hence they have no language of passion for the
service of poetry or of occasions really demanding it; for it has been
already enfeebled by continual association with cases of an
unimpassioned order. But a character of deeper passion has a perpetual
standard in itself, by which as by an instinct it tries all cases, and
rejects the language of passion as disproportionate and ludicrous
where it is not fully justified. "Ah Heavens!" or "Oh my God!" are
exclamations with us so exclusively reserved for cases of profound
interest,--that on hearing a woman even (_i.e._ a person of the sex
most easily excited) utter such words, we look round expecting to see
her child in some situation of danger. But, in France, "Ciel!" and "Oh
mon Dieu!" are uttered by every woman if a mouse does but run across
the floor. The ignorant and the thoughtless however will continue to
class the English character under the phlegmatic temperament, whilst
the philosopher will perceive that it is the exact polar antithesis to
a phlegmatic character. In this conclusion, though otherwise expressed
and illustrated, Walking Stewart's view of the English character will
be found to terminate; and his opinion is especially valuable--first
and chiefly, because he was a philosopher; secondly, because his
acquaintance with man civilized and uncivilized, under all national
distinctions, was absolutely unrivalled. Meantime, this and others of
his opinions were expressed in language that if literally construed
would often appear insane or absurd. The truth is, his long
intercourse with foreign nations had given something of a hybrid
tincture to his diction; in some of his works for instance he uses the
French word _helas!_ uniformly for the English _alas!_ and apparently
with no consciousness of his mistake. He had also this singularity
about him--that he was everlastingly metaphysicizing against
metaphysics. To me, who was buried in metaphysical reveries from my
earliest days, this was not likely to be an attraction; any more than
the vicious structure of his diction was likely to please my
scholarlike taste. All grounds of disgust, however, gave way before my
sense of his powerful merits; and, as I have said, I sought his
acquaintance. Coming up to London from Oxford about 1807 or 1808 I
made enquiries about him; and found that he usually read the papers at
a coffee-room in Piccadilly; understanding that he was poor, it struck
me that he might not wish to receive visits at his lodgings, and
therefore I sought him at the coffee-room. Here I took the liberty of
introducing myself to him. He received me courteously, and invited me
to his rooms--which at that time were in Sherrard-street,
Golden-square--a street already memorable to me. I was much struck
with the eloquence of his conversation; and afterwards I found that
Mr. Wordsworth, himself the most eloquent of men in conversation, had
been equally struck when he had met him at Paris between the years
1790 and 1792, during the early storms of the French revolution. In
Sherrard-street I visited him repeatedly, and took notes of the
conversations I had with him on various subjects. These I must have
somewhere or other; and I wish I could introduce them here, as they
would interest the reader. Occasionally in these conversations, as in
his books, he introduced a few notices of his private history; in
particular I remember his telling me that in the East Indies he had
been a prisoner of Hyder's; that he had escaped with some difficulty;
and that, in the service of one of the native princes as secretary or
interpreter, he had accumulated a small fortune. This must have been
too small, I fear, at that time to allow him even a philosopher's
comforts; for some part of it, invested in the French funds, had been
confiscated. I was grieved to see a man of so much ability, of
gentlemanly manners, and refined habits, and with the infirmity of
deafness, suffering under such obvious privations; and I once took the
liberty, on a fit occasion presenting itself, of requesting that he
would allow me to send him some books which he had been casually
regretting that he did not possess; for I was at that time in the
hey-day of my worldly prosperity. This offer, however, he declined
with firmness and dignity, though not unkindly. And I now mention it,
because I have seen him charged in print with a selfish regard to his
own pecuniary interest. On the contrary, he appeared to me a very
liberal and generous man; and I well remember that, whilst he refused
to accept of anything from me, he compelled me to receive as presents
all the books which he published during my acquaintance with him; two
of these, corrected with his own hand, viz. the _Lyre of Apollo_ and
the _Sophiometer_, I have lately found amongst other books left in
London; and others he forwarded to me in Westmoreland. In 1809 I saw
him often; in the Spring of that year, I happened to be in London; and
Mr. Wordsworth's tract on the Convention of Cintra being at that time
in the printer's hands, I superintended the publication of it; and, at
Mr. Wordsworth's request, I added a long note on Spanish affairs which
is printed in the Appendix. The opinions I expressed in this note on
the Spanish character at that time much calumniated, on the retreat to
Corunna then fresh in the public mind, above all, the contempt I
expressed for the superstition in respect to the French military
prowess which was then universal and at its height, and which gave way
in fact only to the campaigns of 1814 and 1815, fell in, as it
happened, with Mr. Stewart's political creed in those points where at
that time it met with most opposition. In 1812 it was I think that I
saw him for the last time; and by the way, on the day of my parting
with him, had an amusing proof in my own experience of that sort of
ubiquity ascribed to him by a witty writer in the London Magazine: I
met him and shook hands with him under Somerset-house, telling him
that I should leave town that evening for Westmoreland. Thence I went
by the very shortest road (_i.e._ through Moor-street, Soho--for I am
learned in many quarters of London) towards a point which necessarily
led me through Tottenham-court-road; I stopped nowhere, and walked
fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham-court-road I was not overtaken
by (_that_ was comprehensible), but overtook Walking Stewart.
Certainly, as the above writer alleges, there must have been three
Walking Stewarts in London. He seemed no ways surprised at this
himself, but explained to me that somewhere or other in the
neighbourhood of Tottenham-court-road there was a little theatre, at
which there was dancing and occasionally good singing, between which
and a neighbouring coffee-house he sometimes divided his evenings.
Singing, it seems, he could hear in spite of his deafness. In this
street I took my final leave of him; it turned out such; and,
anticipating at the time that it would be so, I looked after his white
hat at the moment it was disappearing, and exclaimed--"Farewell, thou
half-crazy and most eloquent man! I shall never see thy face again." I
did not intend, at that moment, to visit London again for some years;
as it happened, I was there for a short time in 1814; and then I
heard, to my great satisfaction that Walking Stewart had recovered a
considerable sum (about L14,000 I believe) from the East India
Company; and from the abstract given in the London Magazine of the
Memoir by his relation I have since learned that he applied this money
most wisely to the purchase of an annuity, and that he "persisted in
living" too long for the peace of an annuity office. So fare all
companies East and West, and all annuity offices, that stand opposed
in interest to philosophers! In 1814, however, to my great regret, I
did not see him; for I was then taking a great deal of opium, and
never could contrive to issue to the light of day soon enough for a
morning call upon a philosopher of such early hours; and in the
evening I concluded he would be generally abroad, from what he had
formerly communicated to me of his own habits. It seems, however, that
he afterwards held _converzations_ at his own rooms; and did not stir
out to theatres quite so much. From a brother of mine, who at one time
occupied rooms in the same house with him, I learned that in other
respects he did not deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic
tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic
exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former
years, to St. James's Park,--where he sate in contemplative ease
amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his
philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than
one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy
thoughts, if he ever had any.
The works of Walking Stewart must be read with some indulgence; the
titles are generally too lofty and pretending and somewhat
extravagant; the composition is lax and unprecise, as I have before
said; and the doctrines are occasionally very bold, incautiously
stated, and too hardy and high-toned for the nervous effeminacy of
many modern moralists. But Walking Stewart was a man who thought nobly
of human nature; he wrote therefore at times in the spirit and with
the indignation of an ancient prophet against the oppressors and
destroyers of the time. In particular I remember that in one or more
of the pamphlets which I received from him at Grasmere he expressed
himself in such terms on the subject of Tyrannicide (distinguishing
the cases in which it was and was not lawful) as seemed to Mr.
Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher; but, from the
way in which that subject was treated in the House of Commons, where
it was at that time occasionally introduced, it was plain that his
doctrine was not fitted for the luxuries and relaxed morals of the
age. Like all men who think nobly of human nature, Walking Stewart
thought of it hopefully. In some respects his hopes were wisely
grounded; in others they rested too much upon certain metaphysical
speculations which are untenable, and which satisfied himself only
because his researches in that track had been purely self-originated
and self-disciplined. He relied upon his own native strength of mind;
but in questions, which the wisdom and philosophy of every age
building successively upon each other have not been able to settle, no
mind however strong is entitled to build wholly upon itself. In many
things he shocked the religious sense--especially as it exists in
unphilosophic minds: he held a sort of rude and unscientific
Spinosism; and he expressed it coarsely and in the way most likely to
give offence. And indeed there can be no stronger proof of the utter
obscurity in which his works have slumbered than that they should all
have escaped prosecution. He also allowed himself to look too lightly
and indulgently on the afflicting spectacle of female prostitution as
it exists in London and in all great cities. This was the only point
on which I was disposed to quarrel with him; for I could not but view
it as a greater reproach to human nature than the slave-trade or any
sight of wretchedness that the sun looks down upon. I often told him
so; and that I was at a loss to guess how a philosopher could allow
himself to view it simply as part of the equipage of civil life, and
as reasonably making part of the establishment and furniture of a
great city as police-offices, lamplighting, or newspapers. Waiving,
however, this one instance of something like compliance with the
brutal spirit of the world, on all other subjects he was eminently
unworldly, child-like, simple-minded, and upright. He would flatter no
man; even when addressing nations, it is almost laughable to see how
invariably he prefaces his counsels with such plain truths uttered in
a manner so offensive as must have defeated his purpose if it had
otherwise any chance of being accomplished. For instance, in
addressing America, he begins thus: "People of America! since your
separation from the mother-country your moral character has
degenerated in the energy of thought and sense; produced by the
absence of your association and intercourse with British officers and
merchants; you have no moral discernment to distinguish between the
protective power of England and the destructive power of France." And
his letter to the Irish nation opens in this agreeable and
conciliatory manner--"People of Ireland! I address you as a true
philosopher of nature, foreseeing the perpetual misery your
irreflective character and total absence of moral discernment are
preparing for," &c. The second sentence begins thus:--"You are
sacrilegiously arresting the arm of your parent kingdom fighting the
cause of man and nature, when the triumph of the fiend of French
police terror would be your own instant extirpation." And the letter
closes thus:--"I see but one awful alternative--that Ireland will be a
perpetual moral volcano, threatening the destruction of the world, if
the education and instruction of thought and sense shall not be able
to generate the faculty of moral discernment among a very numerous
class of the population, who detest the civic calm as sailors the
natural calm--and make civic rights on which they cannot reason a
pretext for feuds which they delight in." As he spoke freely and
boldly to others, so he spoke loftily of himself; at p. 313 of "The
Harp of Apollo," on making a comparison of himself with Socrates (in
which he naturally gives the preference to himself,) he styles "The
Harp," &c., "this unparalleled work of human energy." At p. 315, he
calls it "this stupendous work;" and lower down on the same page he
says--"I was turned out of school at the age of fifteen for a dunce or
blockhead, because I would not stuff into my memory all the nonsense
of erudition and learning; and if future ages should discover the
unparalleled energies of genius in this work, it will prove my most
important doctrine--that the powers of the human mind must be
developed in the education of thought and sense in the study of moral
opinion, not arts and science." Again, at p. 225 of his Sophiometer,
he says:--"The paramount thought that dwells in my mind incessantly is
a question I put to myself--whether, in the event of my personal
dissolution by death, I have communicated all the discoveries my
unique mind possesses in the great master-science of man and nature."
In the next page he determines that he _has_, with the exception of
one truth,--viz. "the latent energy, physical and moral, of human
nature as existing in the British people." But here he was surely
accusing himself without ground; for to my knowledge he has not failed
in any one of his numerous works to insist upon this theme at least a
billion of times. Another instance of his magnificent self-estimation
is--that in the title pages of several of his works he announces
himself as "John Stewart, the only man of nature[45] that ever
appeared in the world."
[Footnote 45: In Bath he was surnamed "the Child of Nature;"--which
arose from his contrasting on every occasion the existing man of our
present experience with the ideal or Stewartian man that might be
expected to emerge in some myriads of ages, to which latter man he
gave the name of the Child of Nature.]
By this time I am afraid the reader begins to suspect that he was
crazy; and certainly, when I consider every thing, he must have been
crazy when the wind was at N.N.E.; for who but Walking Stewart ever
dated his books by a computation drawn--not from the creation, not
from the flood, not from Nabonassar, or _ab urbe condita_, not from
the Hegira--but from themselves, from their own day of publication, as
constituting the one great aera in the history of man by the side of
which all other aeras were frivolous and impertinent? Thus, in a work
of his given to me in 1812 and probably published in that year, I find
him incidentally recording of himself that he was at that time
"arrived at the age of sixty-three, with a firm state of health
acquired by temperance, and a peace of mind almost independent of the
vices of mankind--because my knowledge of life has enabled me to place
my happiness beyond the reach or contact of other men's follies and
passions, by avoiding all family connexions and all ambitious pursuits
of profit, fame, or power." On reading this passage I was anxious to
ascertain its date; but this, on turning to the title-page, I found
thus mysteriously expressed: "In the 7000th year of Astronomical
History, and the first day of Intellectual Life or Moral World, from
the aera of this work." Another slight indication of craziness appeared
in a notion which obstinately haunted his mind that all the kings and
rulers of the earth would confederate in every age against his works,
and would hunt them out for extermination as keenly as Herod did the
innocents in Bethlehem. On this consideration, fearing that they might
be intercepted by the long arms of these wicked princes before they
could reach that remote Stewartian man or his precursor to whom they
were mainly addressed, he recommended to all those who might be
impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of
each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight
feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to
communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends,
who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet
persons of the next generation; and thus, if the truth was not to be
dispersed for many ages, yet the knowledge that here and there the
truth lay buried on this and that continent, in secret spots on Mount
Caucasus--in the sands of Biledulgerid--and in hiding-places amongst
the forests of America, and was to rise again in some distant age and
to vegetate and fructify for the universal benefit of man,--this
knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to
generation; and, in defiance of a myriad of kings crusading against
him, Walking Stewart was to stretch out the influence of his writings
through a long series of [Greek: lampadophoroi] to that child of
nature whom he saw dimly through a vista of many centuries. If this
were madness, it seemed to me a somewhat sublime madness; and I
assured him of my co-operation against the kings, promising that I
would bury "The Harp of Apollo" in my own orchard in Grasmere at the
foot of Mount Fairfield; that I would bury "The Apocalypse of Nature"
in one of the coves of Helvellyn, and several other places best known
to myself. He accepted my offer with gratitude; but he then made known
to me that he relied on my assistance for a still more important
service--which was this: in the lapse of that vast number of ages
which would probably intervene between the present period and the
period at which his works would have reached their destination, he
feared that the English language might itself have mouldered away.
"No!" I said, "_that_ was not probable; considering its extensive
diffusion, and that it was now transplanted into all the continents of
our planet, I would back the English language against any other on
earth." His own persuasion, however, was that the Latin was destined
to survive all other languages; it was to be the eternal as well as
the universal language; and his desire was that I would translate his
works, or some part of them into that language.[46] This I promised;
and I seriously designed at some leisure hour to translate into Latin
a selection of passages which should embody an abstract of his
philosophy. This would have been doing a service to all those who
might wish to see a digest of his peculiar opinions cleared from the
perplexities of his peculiar diction and brought into a narrow compass
from the great number of volumes through which they are at present
dispersed. However, like many another plan of mine, it went
unexecuted.
[Footnote 46: I was not aware until the moment of writing this passage
that Walking Stewart had publicly made this request three years after
making it to myself: opening the Harp of Apollo, I have just now
accidentally stumbled on the following passage, "This stupendous work
is destined, I fear, to meet a worse fate than the Aloe, which as soon
as it blossoms loses its stalk. This first blossom of reason is
threatened with the loss of both its stalk and its soil; for, if the
revolutionary tyrant should triumph, he would destroy all the English
books and energies of thought. I conjure my readers to translate this
work into Latin, and to bury it in the ground, communicating on their
death-beds only its place of concealment to men of nature."
From the title page of this work, by the way, I learn that the "7000th
year of Astronomical History" is taken from the Chinese tables, and
coincides (as I had supposed) with the year 1812 of our computation.]
On the whole, if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way
which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence--but rather
exalted them. The old maxim, indeed, that "Great wits to madness sure
are near allied," the maxim of Dryden and the popular maxim, I have
heard disputed by Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth, who maintain that
mad people are the dullest and most wearisome of all people. As a
body, I believe they are so. But I must dissent from the authority of
Messrs. Coleridge and Wordsworth so far as to distinguish. Where
madness is connected, as it often is, with some miserable derangement
of the stomach, liver, &c. and attacks the principle of pleasurable
life, which is manifestly seated in the central organs of the body
(i.e. in the stomach and the apparatus connected with it), there it
cannot but lead to perpetual suffering and distraction of thought; and
there the patient will be often tedious and incoherent. People who
have not suffered from any great disturbance in those organs are
little aware how indispensable to the process of thinking are the
momentary influxes of pleasurable feeling from the regular goings on
of life in its primary functions; in fact, until the pleasure is
withdrawn or obscured, most people are not aware that they _have_ any
pleasure from the due action of the great central machinery of the
system; proceeding in uninterrupted continuance, the pleasure as much
escapes the consciousness as the act of respiration; a child, in the
happiest state of its existence, does not _know_ that it is happy. And
generally whatsoever is the level state of the hourly feeling is never
put down by the unthinking (i.e. by 99 out of 100) to the account of
happiness; it is never put down with the positive sign, as equal to _+
x_; but simply as = 0. And men first become aware that it _was_ a
positive quantity, when they have lost it (i.e. fallen into _- x_).
Meantime the genial pleasure from the vital processes, though not
represented to the consciousness, is _immanent_ in every
act--impulse--motion--word--and thought; and a philosopher sees that
the idiots are in a state of pleasure, though they cannot see it
themselves. Now I say that, where this principle of pleasure is not
attached, madness is often little more than an enthusiasm highly
exalted; the animal spirits are exuberant and in excess; and the
madman becomes, if he be otherwise a man of ability and information,
all the better as a companion. I have met with several such madmen;
and I appeal to my brilliant friend, Professor W----, who is not a man
to tolerate dulness in any quarter, and is himself the ideal of a
delightful companion, whether he ever met a more amusing person than
that madman who took a post-chaise with us from ---- to Carlisle, long
years ago, when he and I were hastening with the speed of fugitive
felons to catch the Edinburgh mail. His fancy and his extravagance,
and his furious attacks on Sir Isaac Newton, like Plato's suppers,
refreshed us not only for that day but whenever they recurred to us;
and we were both grieved when we heard some time afterwards from a
Cambridge man that he had met our clever friend in a stage coach under
the care of a brutal keeper.--Such a madness, if any, was the madness
of Walking Stewart; his health was perfect; his spirits as light and
ebullient as the spirits of a bird in springtime; and his mind
unagitated by painful thoughts, and at peace with itself. Hence, if he
was not an amusing companion, it was because the philosophic direction
of his thoughts made him something more. Of anecdotes and matters of
fact he was not communicative; of all that he had seen in the vast
compass of his travels he never availed himself in conversation. I do
not remember at this moment that he ever once alluded to his own
travels in his intercourse with me except for the purpose of weighing
down by a statement grounded on his own great personal experience an
opposite statement of many hasty and misjudging travellers which he
thought injurious to human nature; the statement was this, that in all
his countless rencontres with uncivilized tribes he had never met with
any so ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless
man who was able to make them understand that he threw himself upon
their hospitality and forbearance.
On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary; he had seen and
suffered much amongst men; yet not too much, or so as to dull the
genial tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind
was a mirror of the sentient universe.--The whole mighty vision that
had fleeted before his eyes in this world,--the armies of Hyder-Ali
and his son with oriental and barbaric pageantry,--the civic grandeur
of England, the great deserts of Asia and America,--the vast capitals
of Europe,--London with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and
flow of its "mighty heart,"--Paris shaken by the fierce torments of
revolutionary convulsions, the silence of Lapland, and the solitary
forests of Canada, with the swarming life of the torrid zone, together
with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow, that he
had participated by sympathy--lay like a map beneath him, as if
eternally co-present to his view; so that, in the contemplation of the
prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the parts, or occupy
his mind with details. Hence came the monotony which the frivolous and
the desultory would have found in his conversation. I however, who am
perhaps the person best qualified to speak of him, must pronounce him
to have been a man of great genius; and, with reference to his
conversation, of great eloquence. That these were not better known and
acknowledged was owing to two disadvantages; one grounded in his
imperfect education, the other in the peculiar structure of his mind.
The first was this: like the late Mr. Shelley he had a fine vague
enthusiasm and lofty aspirations in connexion with human nature
generally and its hopes; and like him he strove to give steadiness, a
uniform direction, and an intelligible purpose to these feelings, by
fitting to them a scheme of philosophical opinions. But unfortunately
the philosophic system of both was so far from supporting their own
views and the cravings of their own enthusiasm, that, as in some
points it was baseless, incoherent, or unintelligible, so in others it
tended to moral results, from which, if they had foreseen them, they
would have been themselves the first to shrink as contradictory to the
very purposes in which their system had originated. Hence, in
maintaining their own system they both found themselves painfully
entangled at times with tenets pernicious and degrading to human
nature. These were the inevitable consequences of the [Greek: proton
pseudos] in their speculations; but were naturally charged upon them
by those who looked carelessly into their books as opinions which not
only for the sake of consistency they thought themselves bound to
endure, but to which they gave the full weight of their sanction and
patronage as to so many moving principles in their system. The other
disadvantage under which Walking Stewart laboured was this: he was a
man of genius, but not a man of talents; at least his genius was out
of all proportion to his talents, and wanted an organ as it were for
manifesting itself; so that his most original thoughts were delivered
in a crude state--imperfect, obscure, half developed, and not
producible to a popular audience. He was aware of this himself; and,
though he claims everywhere the faculty of profound intuition into
human nature, yet with equal candour he accuses himself of asinine
stupidity, dulness, and want of talent. He was a disproportioned
intellect, and so far a monster; and he must be added to the long list
of original-minded men who have been looked down upon with pity and
contempt by common-place men of talent, whose powers of mind--though a
thousand times inferior--were yet more manageable, and ran in channels
more suited to common uses and common understandings.
N.B. About the year 1812 I remember seeing in many of the print-shops
a whole-length sketch in water-colours of Walking Stewart in his
customary dress and attitude. This, as the only memorial (I presume)
in that shape of a man whose memory I love, I should be very glad to
possess; and therefore I take the liberty of publicly requesting as a
particular favour from any reader of this article, who may chance to
remember such a sketch in any collection of prints offered for sale,
that he would cause it to be sent to the Editor of the LONDON
MAGAZINE, who will pay for it.
_De Quincey._