It behooves every man, toiling along this dusty roadway of life, to seize upon something which he may study and elaborate, that at the end of his journey he may look back and content himself it has not been utterly in vain to himself and his fellow pilgrims. A man with a mania, or, as the Greeks have it, a man with a _madness_, is the true world-advancer. This madness, when cultured, ripens into talent; if original and inborn, we call it genius, and the subtile anatomists of the French schools prove it by telling us that the brains of geniuses are diseased. The healthy oyster ministers only to the palate. It is the diseased oyster that secretes the pearl for Miss Shoddy's necklace. It is the diseased brain that shines through the ages, lights men on to new epochs in knowledge, and advances the race to the millennial perfection. Immortal Jean Paul, picturing himself in Schoppe, knew this. For what is all of Schoppe's eloquent and matchless buffoonery, compared with his wise oracles, in the mad conflicts with his other 'I,' whom he saw in the mirror of his diseased brain? Therefore, let every man have his madness, to which he may give his leisure and his thoughtful hours. Let it grow upon him, until it becomes a strong, controlling, natural element, as Mozart grew into music and Haydon into painting, and is ingrained into his very habit and method of life; for it is only thus and then he becomes a master, fitted to lead the van in the world's march. Only, let it be a praise-worthy madness, and one the development of which wilt secure for himself some new fund of knowledge, and add to the store of his fellow men. It was somewhat in this vein I looked upon a dingy skilling species, with its rudely crossed hammers--a rough coin, bold, sturdy, and rigid as the old Norse character itself which formed the initial of my cabinet--a cabinet which has given to me new ideas of the low-browed Roman and elegant Greek; has admitted me to the arcana of their fascinating mythology; has whispered strange tales of a mummy's perfumed sleep in the shadow of the awful, eternal Sphynx; has taken me to the fall of Grenada, and, bridging over the dark lapse of the ages, has emerged with the resurrection of art into the bloody days of early English history--the grim Puritanic times, when good old John Hull, the mintmaster, regulated the finances of the colonies, and filled his own pockets with pine-tree shillings and sixpences; the horrors of Danton and Marat; marking faithfully each historic change from orient to Occident, and culminating in that latest triumph of the engraver's cunning skill--the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair medal, commemorating for our children and children's children the magnificent benefactions of the people and the self-devotion of the Commissions--Christian and Sanitary--the angels of mercy and charity, scattering blessings in the furrows of war.