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fumes issuing from a jakes will furnish as comely and useful a
vapour as incense from an altar. Thus far, I suppose, will easily
be granted me; and then it will follow that as the face of Nature
never produces rain but when it is overcast and disturbed, so human
understanding seated in the brain must be troubled and overspread by
vapours ascending from the lower faculties to water the invention
and render it fruitful. Now although these vapours (as it hath been
already said) are of as various original as those of the skies, yet
the crop they produce differs both in kind and degree, merely
according to the soil. I will produce two instances to prove and
explain what I am now advancing.
A certain great prince {126a} raised a mighty army, filled his
coffers with infinite treasures, provided an invincible fleet, and
all this without giving the least part of his design to his greatest
ministers or his nearest favourites. Immediately the whole world
was alarmed, the neighbouring crowns in trembling expectation
towards what point the storm would burst, the small politicians
everywhere forming profound conjectures. Some believed he had laid
a scheme for universal monarchy; others, after much insight,
determined the matter to be a project for pulling down the Pope and
setting up the Reformed religion, which had once been his own. Some
again, of a deeper sagacity, sent him into Asia to subdue the Turk
and recover Palestine. In the midst of all these projects and
preparations, a certain state-surgeon {126b}, gathering the nature
of the disease by these symptoms, attempted the cure, at one blow
performed the operation, broke the bag and out flew the vapour; nor
did anything want to render it a complete remedy, only that the
prince unfortunately happened to die in the performance. Now is the
reader exceeding curious to learn from whence this vapour took its
rise, which had so long set the nations at a gaze? What secret
wheel, what hidden spring, could put into motion so wonderful an
engine? It was afterwards discovered that the movement of this
whole machine had been directed by an absent female, who was removed
into an enemy's country. What should an unhappy prince do in such
ticklish circumstances as these? He tried in vain the poet's never-
failing receipt of corpora quaeque, for
"Idque petit corpus mens unde est saucia amore;
Unde feritur, eo tendit, gestitque coire."--Lucr.
Having to no purpose used all peaceable endeavours, the collected
part of the semen, raised and inflamed, became adust, converted to
choler, turned head upon the spinal duct, and ascended to the brain.
The very same principle that influences a bully to break the windows
of a woman who has jilted him naturally stirs up a great prince to
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