predilection for the rhythm and assonances of verse in prose writing, even an exaggerated degree of originality may be considered as morbid phenomena. So also is the mania of writing in Biblical form, in detached verses, and with special favourite words, which are underlined, or repeated many times, and a certain graphic symbolism. Here I must acknowledge that, when I see how many of the organs which claim to direct public opinion are infected with this tendency, and how often young writers undertake to discuss grave social problems in the capricious phraseology of the lunatic asylum, and the disjointed periods of Biblical times, as though our robust lungs were unable to cope with the vigorous and manly inspirations of the Latin construction, I feel grave apprehensions for the future of the rising generation.
On the other hand, the analogy of mattoids with genius, whose morbid phenomena only are inherited by them, and with sane persons, with whom they have shrewdness and practical sense in common, ought to put students on their guard against certain systems, springing up by hundreds, more particularly in the abstract or inexact sciences, and due to the efforts of men incompetent, from a lack either of capacity or knowledge of the subject, to deal with them. In these systems declamation, assonances, paradoxes, and conceptions often original, but always incomplete and contradictory, take the place of calm reasoning based on a minute and unprejudiced study of facts. Such books are nearly always the work of those true though involuntary charlatans, the mattoids, who are more widely diffused in the literary world than is commonly supposed.
Nor is it only students who should be on their guard. against them, but especially politicians. Not that, in an age of free criticism like our own, there is any danger that these pretended reformers, who are stimulated and guided solely by mental disease, should be taken seriously; but the obstacles justly opposed to them may, by irritating, sharpen and complete their insanity, transforming a harmless delusion—whether ideological, as in the case of most mattoids, or sensorial, as in monomaniacs—into active madness, in which their greater
