For the rest, throughout the whole stage, I had a constant source of
altercation with the coachman, because he grudged stopping perhaps
once in the quarter of an hour, when I chose to come out for a
natural purpose. Unhappily, in truth, one has little reason to expect
water-doctors among the postilion class, since Physicians themselves
have so seldom learned from Haller's large _Physiology_ that a
postponement of the above operation will precipitate devilish
stone-ware, and at last precipitate the proprietor himself; this
stone-manufactory being generally concluded, not by the Lithotomist,
but by Death. Had postilions read that Tycho Brahe died like a
bombshell by bursting, they would rather pull up for a moment; with
such unlooked-for knowledge, they would see it to be reasonable that a
man, though expecting some time to carry his death-stone _on_ him,
should not incline, for the time being, to carry it _in_ him. Nay, have
I not often, at Weimar, in the longest concluding scenes of Schiller,
run out with tears in my eyes; purely that, while his Minerva was
melting me on the whole, I might not by the Gorgon's head on her breast
be partially turned to stone? And did I not return to the weeping
play-house, and fall into the general emotion so much the more briskly,
as now I had nothing to give vent to but my heart?
------------------------
103. Or are all Mosques, Episcopal-churches, Pagodas, Chapels-of-Ease,
Tabernacles, and Pantheons, anything else than the Ethnic Forecourt of
the Invisible Temple and its Holy of Holies?
------------------------
Deep in the dark we arrived at Niederschöna.
_Third Stage; from Niederschöna to Flätz_.
While I am standing at the Posthouse musing, with my eye fixed on my
portmanteau, comes a beast of a watchman, and bellows and brays in his
night-tube so close by my ear that I start back in trepidation, I whom
even a too hasty accosting will vex. Is there no medical police, then,
against such efflated hour-fulminators and alarm-cannon, by which
notwithstanding no gunpowder cannon are saved? In my opinion nobody
should be invested with the watchman-horn but some reasonable man, who
had already blown himself into an asthma, and who would consequently be
in case to sing out his hour-verse so low that you could not hear it.
------------------------
40. The common man is copious only in narration, not in reasoning; the
cultivated man is brief only in the former, not in the latter; because
the common man's reasons are a sort of sensations, which, as well as
things visible, he merely _looks at_; by the cultivated man, again,
both reasons and things visible are rather _thought_ than looked at.
------------------------
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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