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Never, probably, did invalids have gayer times than our two, after a week of solitary confinement; for school gossip crept in, games could not be prevented, and Christmas secrets were concocted in those rooms till they were regular conspirators' dens, when they were not little Bedlams.
Bedlams totally extinct to everybody; but which were then very real, and raged wide as the world, high as the stars, to a hideous degree among the then sons of men; unimaginable now by any mortal. And, alas, this is one of the grand difficulties for my readers and me; Friedrich's Life-element having fallen into such a dismal condition.
The little gloomy cabin was going hither and thither in a style which reminded him of the tossings of Gulliver's cage after it had been dropped into the sea by the Brobdingnag eagle. The steward was seizing up mutinous trunks and chairs to the table legs with rope-yarns. The lamp was swinging and the captain's compass see-sawing like monkeys who had gone crazy in bedlams of tree-tops.
This busy, puzzling stirrer up of doubt, That frames deep mysteries, then finds them out, Filling, with frantic crowds of thinking fools, Those reverend bedlams, colleges, and schools; Borne on whose wings each heavy sot can pierce The limits of the boundless universe. So charming ointments make an old witch fly, And bear a crippled carcase through the sky.
But they that were appointed to examine them did not believe them to be any other than bedlams and mad, or else such as came to put all things into a confusion in the fair. Therefore they took them and beat them, and besmeared them with dirt, and then put them into the cage, that they might be made a spectacle to all the men of the fair.
The present state of this man is sufficiently declared in these particulars 1. In all this, what qualification shows itself as precedent to justification? None but such as devils work, or as rank bedlams have. Yet this poor man was dispossessed, taken into God's compassion, and was bid to show it to the world.
But they that were appointed to examine them did not believe them to be any other than bedlams and mad, or else such as came to put all things into a confusion in the fair. Therefore they took them and beat them, and besmeared them with dirt, and then put them into the cage, that they might be made a spectacle to all the men of the fair.
'I remember, says Aubrey, 'before the civil wars, Tom o' Bedlams went about begging, etc. but one cannot help remarking that a very numerous family connection of the collateral branches of his house bearing, on the whole, a sufficiently striking family resemblance to this illustrious subject of the Poet's pencil, appear to have got safely over all the political and social gulfs that intervene between our time and that.
'I remember, before the civil wars, Tom o' Bedlams went about begging, Aubrey says.
Bedlams have been filled with such horrors; thousands, nay millions of feeble minds are suffering by them or from them, at this minute, all over the world. Dante's best critic, Foscolo, has said much of the heroical nature of the age in which the poet lived; but he adds, that its mixture of knowledge and absurdity is almost inexplicable.
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