the thickest. What criminal is that who wishes to abscond from public
justice? Let him hurry into the frantic publicities of London, and by no
means into the quiet privacies of the country. So, and upon the analogy
of these cases, we may understand that, to make a strife overwhelming by
a thousand fold to the feelings, it must not deal with gross material
interests, but with such as rise into the world of dreams, and act
upon the nerves through spiritual, and not through fleshly torments.
Mine, in the present case, rose suddenly, like a rocket, into their
meridian altitude, by means of a hint furnished to my brother from a
Scotch advocate's reveries.

This advocate, who by his writings became the remote cause of so much
affliction to my childhood, and struck a blow at the dignity of
Gombroon, that neither my brother nor all the forces of Tigrosylvania
(my brother's kingdom) ever could have devised, was the celebrated
James Burnett, better known to the English public by his judicial title
of Lord Monboddo. The Burnetts of Monboddo, I have often heard, were
a race distinguished for their intellectual accomplishments through
several successive generations; and the judge in question was eminently
so. It did him no injury that many people regarded him as crazy. In
England, at the beginning of the last century, we had a saying,
[15] in reference to the Harveys of Lord Bristol's family, equally
distinguished for wit, beauty, and eccentricity, that at the creation
there had been three kinds of people made, viz., men, women, and Harveys;
and by all accounts, something of the same kind might plausibly have been
said in Scotland about the Burnetts. Lord Monboddo's nieces, of whom one
perished by falling from a precipice, (and, as I have heard, through mere
absence of mind, whilst musing upon a book which she carried in her
hand,) still survive in the affection of many friends, through the
interest attached to their intellectual gifts; and Miss Burnett, the