_"When the maggot bites"_ (Vol. viii., p 244.).--An ANON correspondent asks
for a note to explain the origin of the saying that thing done on the spur
of the moment is done "when the maggot bites." Perhaps the best explanation
is that afforded in the following passage from Swift's _Discourse on the
Mechanical Operation of the Spirit_:
"It is the opinion of choice _virtuosi_ that the brain is only a crowd
of little animals with teeth and claws extremely sharp, and which cling
together in the contexture we behold, like the picture of Hobbes's
Leviathan; or like bees in perpendicular swarm on a tree; or like a
carrion corrupted into vermin, still preserving the shape and figure of
the mother animal: that all invention is formed by the morsure of two
or more of these animals upon certain capillary nerves which proceed
from thence, whereof three branches spring into the tongue and two into
the right hand. They hold also that these animals are of a constitution
extremely cold: that their food is the air we attract, their excrement
phlegm. And that what we vulgarly call rheums, and colds, and
distillations, is nothing else but an epidemical looseness to which
that little commonwealth is very subject from the climate it lies
under. Farther, that nothing less than a violent heat can disentangle
these creatures from their hamated station in life; or give them vigour
and humour, to imprint the marks of their little teeth. That if the
morsure be hexagonal, it produces poetry; the circular gives eloquence.
If the bite hath been conical, the person whose nerve is so affected
shall be disposed to write upon politics; and so of the rest."