a fool."-Shakspeare.

WHY is it that all the world are so bitter against fools? They are the great staple of the creation, and they are the work of God, "as well as better men.' Of the mass of mankind, the larger part are fools all over; and the rest differ only in having their folly variegated by an occasional vein of wisdom, hardly more than sufficient for preventing themselves from burning their fingers; and this, too, is often of that bastard sort which is more appropriately designated by the name of cunning.

Even the wisest of mankind pay their due tribute to Nemesis, and exhibit occasional touches of folly, which set the duller souls staring by its exaggerated absurdity. Happy, indeed, is it for them that this is the case; for, without some such protecting infirmity, they would be put out of all relation to their fellow-creatures. The faultless monsters would be as much displaced in society, as a frog in a bottle of carbonic acid, or Liston in a Quakers' meeting.

Folly is the rule of Nature, and wisdom but the exception; and to complain of it is to "complain you are a man."

The outcry against folly is a mere rebellion against Heaven. It shows an utter want of self-knowledge, or a contemptible affectation. In one word, it is no better than sheer cant, and ought, like all other cant, to be put down by general acclamation. Providence makes nothing in vain ; and the bare fact of this multiplicity of fools should lead, by the shortest route, to a conviction that they are a very useful, and therefore a very respectable class of personages. Those, however, who are deeply versed in the philosophy of human life, will make no difficulty in acknowledging (sub rosâ, be it understood) that the whole scheme of Nature is based on the folly of mankind;

and that two grains more of commonsense in the composition of the animal would have ruined the entire concern, and have rendered the physical organization of the species unfitted for the world it was destined to inhabit. The whole state and condition of civilized society, at least, is built upon the single relation of folly to dupery; and unless one were mad enough to desire, with Jean Jacques, a return to simple savagery, one must look with complacency upon this sine qua non of the social system. The exclusive end of all government is but a sort of game law to keep fools (under the pretext of protecting them from the inroads of unlicensed knaves) in a preserve for the battus of the regular sportsmen. A community of sheer rogues would destroy itself, like two millstones moving without the intervention of a material to be ground. A nation of fools would be devoured by their neighbors; but a society compounded of the two, with a proper intermixture of those. who are, in their own persons, an happy mixture of both, is admirably qualified for the maintenance of "social order, and the relations of civilized life."

Folly is therefore the ultimate cause of all that is brilliant and elevated in social polity. Without fools, we should have neither kings, nor bishops, nor judges, nor generals, nor police magistrates, nor constables; or, at least, if such things existed, they would be constituted so differently from those which at present bear the name, that they would no longer be worthy of it. They would be stripped of all the sublime and beautiful in which they now rejoice; and the polished Corinthian capital would be divested of the better part of its gilding and ornament. There would be no sinecures, no pensions, no reversionary

grants, no proconsular colonies, and no close boroughs to claim them; nothing, in short, to distinguish men from the beasts of the field! This is the very touchstone of political science; and yet men go on abusing the blockheads and dolts, as if they were a superfluity in nature, and a let and an hindrance to the public at large. But the matter does not stop here. Banish folly from the intellectual complex, and the major part even of the honester callings must cease and be abandoned. The world would become little better than one vast tub of Diogenes, and its population would be as unaccommodated and as idle as the people of Ireland. If the simple desire of fencing out the inclemency of the elements alone presided over the choice of our habiliments, and nothing were granted to folly and ostentation, what would become of the tailor, and of the milliner and mantua-maker? It is folly and vanity that render these trades a means of genteel livelihood to so many worthy citizens; and without them the Stultzes and the Herbots would pine in the same hopeless obscurity as the vilest country botch. How little of the twenty yards of silk which my wife assures me is indispensable to the building of a decent evening dress, belong to wisdom and propriety; and how much is dedicated, under the names of gigots, volans à dent, ruches, and furbelos, to the service of folly! How little of the stupendous and complicated piece of architecture, called a bonnet, depends upon the capacity of the head which bears it. The helmet of the Castle of Otranto is but a type of its marvellous disproportion. Like the interior of St. Peter's at Rome, the first aspect of it overwhelms the spectator with a deep sense of awe, and impresses him with as full a conviction as death itself, of the microcosm of man.

With respect to the other great essential of life, the eating and the drinking, folly is no less predominant. Not that I am insensible to the advan

tages of good cookery, or disposed to set down the labors of Messrs. Ude, and Kitchener (peace to his manes!) among the vanities of vanity. On the contrary, I believe most potently in the truth of that proverb which teaches, that when Divine Providence gave to man the fruits of the earth and the inhabitants of the three elements to make out a dinner, the devil, with a corresponding malice, dragged into upper air that quintessential spoil-sport, a bad cook. "He who does not mind his belly," said Doctor Johnson, the Magnus Apollo of all Church and State maxim-mongers and moralists, will hardly mind anything.”* To be indifferent to what one eats, is not to know right from wrong; and is one of the few species of folly, which is bad in itself, and deserving of universal vituperation. I speak not then of salmis and fricandeaux, and of the other essentials of a good table, but of those numerous inventions for pleasing the eye at the expense of the stomach,the temples, the flowers, the figures, the carmels, and, above all, of that giant abuse, the plateau, whose ponderous and massive vastness feeds nothing but the pride and vanity of the ostentatious owner. Of the hundreds of articles which go to the set-out of a formal dinner-table, and which occupy the entire morning of a butler and a pantry-boy to display, how few, how very few administer to the real comfort of the meal! Yet, were these not in demand, an host of industrious persons would be thrown out of employment. Then again it would be a sore day for the tobacconist, if mankind were given only to the essentials of a cigar, a pinch of blackguard, or a quid of pigtail. Drive out Folly with her fifty guinea meerschaum, her highly ornamented mull, her cherry sticks, and her ruinously extravagant hookah, and the poor tradesman would starve. The kindred shop of the perfumer affords another illustration of the same verity. It is not the Windsor soap and the toothbrush that enable the

shopkeeper to drive his curricle and to sport his villa. These he owes to the essences, the atars, the scents, and the cosmetics, which are dedicated to the service of Folly, together with the gold and silver nécessaires that are anything but necessary to the beaux, who cannot travel a step without them. But

it would be ungenerous to push this matter farther. That reader must be far beyond the average folly, which is the subject of this paper, who cannot draw a general conclusion from the foregoing particulars, and satisfy himself that commerce would cease with the existence of fools; and consequently that they are of the last necessity to that complex, which is the pride, boast, and prosperity of the summary of all perfection, the model of all civilization, the type of all morality, Old England. The utility of fools in the various departments of literature is a mystery of a more recondite nature. You, however, know, Mr. Editor, and so do Messrs. Colburn and Murray, that they are the best customers of the trade. Without fools there would be no watering-places, and without watering-places there would be no circulating libraries worth mentioning; without circulating libraries there would be no fashionable novels, no light poetry, no squibs, no autobiography, and (tell it not in Gath) no reviews and magazines; and without all these there would be no authors nor booksellers-miserable sorites! The handsomest and the best books (in the bookseller's sense of the word) are got up exclusively for the fools. Without the aid of fools, both as purchasers and as authors too, there would be no embroiling of the sciences, no factions in literature, no party politics, no angry polemics, no Kantism, no animal magnetism, no phrenology, no eternal disputes on corn and currency; the paper-makers might stop there millwheels, and the pressmen be placed under the command of a lieutenant of the navy. Without foolish authors criticism would perish for want of its proper pabulum, or at most a blue and yellow octavo would be called for once

or so in a century. Without fools the journalists would be no less distressed. There would be no leading articles, no exciting slanders, no slang descriptions of the beastly chivalry of the prize ring, no lengthy columns concerning captivating swindlers and interesting cut-throats; no canting narrations of fetes, nor servile sycophantic pratings of the whereabouts of royal infants, of boating-parties, poney-chaises, of lords in waiting, and "ladies of the domestic circle," and, worst of all, there would be no advertisements, no poetic advocacy of white champagne and black polish, no surgical moralizing concerning "the morning of life and the delusions of passion," no invitations to single ladies of decent competence to marry felons, no notices of tradesmen leaving off business, or of savings of full fifty per cent. in the purchase of calicoes. This multiplicity of advertisements proves to demonstration that the English are the greatest fools under the sun; and are they not the most prosperous of people, the envy of surrounding nations, and the admiration of the entire world?

An

What more would you have? adequate supply of fools, moreover, is highly important in a political sense, as the raw materials of standing armies so urgently necessary to society as the first elements of modern government. Poverty and gin, indeed, might go far in raising the necessary contingent of common soldiers, to be shot at and knocked on the head at sixpence per diem. But it would be difficult, I think, to persuade wise men of princely fortunes to forego their ease and independence, and risk their capital in commissions and often-changed accoutrements, for the mere pleasure of strutting about in laced clothes and fur caps, like our sucking cornets and ensigns. The multiplicity of fools, too, is the joyful occasion of the present flourishing condition of the practice of physic. To the folly of mankind, medicine is indebted, at once, for half the diseases on which it operates, and for the fame of its principal remedies. A well-stored apotheca

ry's shop is a standing monument of human credulity and imbecility; and the blue or pink bottle in its illuminated window is a Pharos shining over the sunken rocks of the owner's shal

:

low qualifications. Among the rich variety of its accumulated disgusts, there are, at most, some half dozen or dozen drugs which skill can turn to account. The rest are never better than the innocuous instruments of foolcatching too often they are either positively or negatively poisons, in the hands of that empiricism which sets colleges and corporations at defiance. Not, indeed, that the worst quacks are always to be found among men divested of diplomas, or those who disguise the implements of their trade beneath the mystery of a three-halfpenny stamp. No two things can be more distinct than the trade and the profession of physic. The professor administers to the maladies of the patient; the trader to his passions. The professor acquires skill by anatomizing the dead; the trader thrives by cutting up the living. If to flattery and slander he adds a good dash of hypocrisy, and proves his competence in medicine by his progress in theology, his fortunes are made. The fools fall to his share, and he thrives; while the professor, in possession of the wise men, starves by inches upon their custom, and dies in disappointment. In law, likewise, but why mention law? Its luxuries are too expensive for ordinary indulgence; and, after all, it is only the very greatest of fools that voluntarily rush into its labyrinths: it is the rogue who usually commences litigation. Besides, law is only another name for gaming; and as throwing dice is the gayest mode of trusting to chance, it will probably soon supersede the law altogether. In politics, the utility of fools is unbounded. Without their general interposition between the

rogues who lead parties, the latter would come into such close contact, that questions would be settled, one way or other, without delay; and the world would at least lose the amusement of a protracted struggle: and, farther, without the particular intervention of fools, to do the dirty work of politics, and to hazard measures of which the most barefaced villany would be ashamed, policy would be cut off from half its best means, and from all the applause which attends a successful stroke. We all know that this class of persons rush in where wise men fear to go, and are therefore especially formed by nature for fulfilling the functions of a cat's-paw. But why enlarge on this subject? Twenty folio volumes would not exhaust it. Nay, are the Statutes at large anything else than one vast text-book on the political utility of fools?

Considering the boundless advantages of folly, and the corresponding bounty of Providence in keeping up the stock of fools, it may readily be presupposed that their condition is by no means without its comforts; and the fact corresponds with the presumption. There is no one in life so thoroughly self-satisfied as your thorough fool. It is the miserable prerogative of reason to bring us acquainted with the rich variety of our miseries, and with the empty nothingness of the objects on which humanity fixes its desires. The highest flight of wisdom is to lash the mind to a stoical patience of suffering, and, by bringing a conviction of the realities of life, of their necessity, and their inevitability, to screw our courage to the sticking-place, and inspire us with a becoming resignation. The fool, on the contrary, sees nothing of all this.*

Folly, says the Greek tragedian, makes the sweetest life, and, of all

A fool enjoys the sweets of life,
Unwounded by its cares;
His passions never are at strife,
He hopes, not he, nor fears.

If Fortune smile, as smile she will, Upon her booby brood,

The fool anticipates no ill,

But reaps the present good.

evils, is the least painful ;* and Champfort justly remarks, that Nature in pity relieves us from the load of existence when the passions cease to blind us to the evils by which it is surrounded. Who ever heard of a fool committing suicide, or staining himself with any of the greater crimes which spring from intensity of feeling? The French, before the Revolution, had an exalted but false idea of the philosophy of the English, and this justifies another of their prejudices respecting our tendency to melancholy. However good it may be to be merry and wise, the union of the two is by no means so easy to effect. The Quakers are remarkable for their sense and practical wisdom; but are they not at the same time the muzziest mortals in existence? Your man of wit laughs only when he has a good cause ; but the fool laughs at everything at anything-at nothing. Our ancestors, whose wisdom is proverbial, and is only called in question by Jacobins and innovators, were thrown upon professional fools or jesters for their merriment. They were too staid and grave a race to venture upon a laugh of their own raising; whereas we moderns, who are too silly to stir a step in safety without their guidance, keep up the circulation of the blood by endless laughing at our own jokes and our neighbors' absurdities.

It is then a most merciful dispensation of Providence that multiplies fools, and confines within the narrowest limits those who must either burst with indignation at triumphant villany, or pine into atrophy at the aspect of human misery. The superiority of folly is observable in the fact, that the greatest geniuses are glad to take occasional refuge in fooling. It is also well worthy of remark, that the rich and the noble, who may command their own company, seldom surround

themselves with associates of high intellectual powers, but give a marked preference to those least able to set the Thames on fire. If, from a misplaced vanity, an individual among them now and then is ambitious of appearing clever himself, and seeks to open his table to the lettered, the scientific, and the deep thinker, his choice more frequently stumbles upon some blue-stocking pretender or charlatan, some wholesale dealer in solemn plausibilities, or worthy blockhead, whose accidental acquirements serve only to render his native folly more saliently conspicuous. He who would get on in the world, must sedulously hide from it his superiority. The man of merit, who makes too open a display of his abilities, is distrusted and hated. He must be dissatisfied, and therefore is dangerous. It is not the dull and the silly who breed revolutions, but that sect, hated of gods and men, the philosophers. Their knowledge is disaffection, and their science infidelity. Had there been no geniuses in France, the world would not have groaned under the oppression of a Bonaparte, and that nation would have enjoyed to all eternity the mild, benignant, and paternal sway of the Bourbons.

It is not then wonderful that the wisest governments lay themselves so deliberately out for captivating the good graces of fools. For their benefit, the most expensive ceremonies are instituted; for them, fasts are proclaimed, kings' speeches laboriously conned by heart, Antijacobin and Quarterly Reviews written, ribbons and medals multiplied, and State-trumpeters hired; for their especial amusement, robes and jewels are called into play, and maces surcharged with the very best double gilding. If none but clever persons were to be consulted, there would be no occasion for late debates,

The happy fool no anguish feels,
He weighs nor gains nor loss.

When knaves o'erreach, and friends betray,
Whilst men of sense run mad,

'Tis silly to be sad.

Since free from sorrow, fear, and shame,

A fool thus fate defies,

The greatest folly I can name

Is to be over-wise.