“This, sir, is one of the dangers of solitude, which the hermit has confessed not always to promote goodness, and the astronomer’s misery has proved to be not always propitious to wisdom.”

“I will no more,” said the favourite, “imagine myself the queen of Abissinia.  I have often spent the hours, which the princess gave to my own disposal, in adjusting ceremonies, and regulating the court; I have repressed the pride of the powerful, and granted the petitions of the poor; I have built new palaces in more happy situations, planted groves upon the tops of mountains, and have exulted in the beneficence of royalty, till, when the princess entered, I had almost forgotten to bow down before her.”

“And I,” said the princess, “will not allow myself any more to play the shepherdess in my waking dreams.  I have often soothed my thoughts with the quiet and innocence of pastoral employments, till I have, in my chamber, heard the winds whistle, and the sheep bleat:  sometimes freed the lamb entangled in the thicket, and, sometimes, with my crook, encountered the wolf.  I have a dress like that of the village maids, which I put on to help my imagination, and a pipe, on which I play softly, and suppose myself followed by my flocks.”

“I will confess,” said the prince, “an indulgence of fantastick delight more dangerous than yours.  I have frequently endeavoured to image the possibility of a perfect government, by which all wrong should be restrained, all vice reformed, and all the subjects preserved in tranquillity and innocence.  This thought produced innumerable schemes of reformation, and dictated many useful regulations and salutary edicts.  This has been the sport, and sometimes the labour, of my solitude; and I start, when I think, with how little anguish I once supposed the death of my father and my brothers.”

“Such,” said Imlac, “are the effects of visionary schemes; when we first form them, we know them to be absurd, but familiarize them by degrees, and, in time, lose sight of their folly.”

[a] See Traite Medico-philosophique sur l’Alienation Mentale, par Pinel.  Dr. Willis defined, in remarkable accordance with this case in Rasselas, insanity to be the tendency of a mind to cherish one idea, or one set of ideas, to the exclusion of others.—­ED.

CHAP.  XLV.

THEY DISCOURSE WITH AN OLD MAN.

The evening was now far past, and they rose to return home.  As they walked along the bank of the Nile, delighted with the beams of the moon quivering on the water, they saw, at a small distance, an old man, whom the prince had often heard in the assembly of the sages.  “Yonder,” said he, “is one whose years have calmed his passions, but not clouded his reason:  let us close the disquisitions of the night, by inquiring, what are his sentiments of his own state, that we may know whether youth alone is to struggle with vexation, and whether any better hope remains for the latter part of life.”