and so far it ought to have been paradoxical, (that is, revolting to
popular opinion,) but was _not_ so; for it fell in with prevailing
opinions, with the oldest, blindest, and most inveterate of human
superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not _seem_
extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never
have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and
atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in
that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of
mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most
morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you
please, of fantastic) but still of most real distress.

How much it would have astonished Lord Monboddo to find himself made
answerable, virtually made answerable, by the evidence of secret tears,
for the misery of an unknown child in Lancashire. Yet night and day
these silent memorials of suffering were accusing him as the founder
of a wound that could not be healed. It happened that the several
volumes of his work lay for weeks in the study of our tutor. Chance
directed the eye of my brother, one day, upon that part of the work
in which Lord M. unfolds his hypothesis that originally the human race
had been a variety of the ape. On which hypothesis, by the way, Dr.
Adam Clarke's substitution of _ape_ for _serpent_, in translating the
word _nachash_, (the brute tempter of Eve,) would have fallen to the
ground, since this would simply have been the case of one human being
tempting another. It followed inevitably, according to Lord M., however
painful it might be to human dignity, that in this, their early stage
of brutality, men must have had tails. My brother mused upon this
revery, and, in a few days, published an extract from some scoundrel's
travels in Gombroon, according to which the Gombroonians had not yet
emerged from this early condition of apedom. They, it seems, were still