It may be the kindness bred of a fellow feeling, but I must confess to a warm side towards my brethren of the motley tribe. While on the one hand I firmly hold with Elihu—who seems to have represented young Uz among the friends of Job—that “great men are not always wise.” I rejoice on the other hand in the concession of Polonius,—chief old Fogy of the court of Denmark,—that there is “a happiness which madness often hits on, that reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.” Folly and craziness, quotha! Did it, then, never occur to you, O Worldly Wiseman, that even your wisdom might be bettered by a dash of that which you thus contemptuously brand? Or does the apostle seem to you as one that driveleth, when he says, “If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise?” I have often admired the sagacity of our mediæval forefathers, in the treatment of their (so called) fools. They gave them a _special licence_ of the tongue; for they justly estimated the advantages which the truly wise know how to draw from the untrammelled utterances of any honest mind, especially of minds which, refusing to run tamely in the oiled grooves of prescriptive and fashionable orthodoxy, are the more likely, now and then, (where if only by accident,) to hit upon truths which others missed. Hence they maintained an “Independent Order” of the motley, whose only business it was freely to think and freely speak their minds. “I must have liberty withal,” says Jaques, aspiring to this dignity, —“as free a charter as the wind, To blow on whom I please: for _so fools have_.” And he adds, in a strain of admonition which certain contemporaneous events might almost lead one to consider prophetic— “They that are most galled with my folly, They most must laugh. And why, sir, must they so? The _why_ is as plain as way to parish church. He that a fool doth very wisely hit, Doth very foolishly, although he smart, Not to seem senseless of the bob. If not, The wise man’s folly is anatomised Even by the squandering glances of the fool. * * What then? Let me see wherein My speech hath wronged him. If it do him right, Then he hath wronged himself; if he be free, Why then, my taxing like a wild goose flies, Unclaimed of any man.”