with paleness, leanness, crassness, sore eyes, and an old age and death
contracted before their time (though yet, what matter is it, when he die
that never lived?); and such is the picture of this great wise man.

And here again do those frogs of the Stoics croak at me and say that
nothing is more miserable than madness. But folly is the next degree, if
not the very thing. For what else is madness than for a man to be out of
his wits? But to let them see how they are clean out of the way, with the
Muses' good favor we'll take this syllogism in pieces. Subtly argued, I
must confess, but as Socrates in Plato teaches us how by splitting one
Venus and one Cupid to make two of either, in like manner should those
logicians have done and distinguished madness from madness, if at least
they would be thought to be well in their wits themselves. For all
madness is not miserable, or Horace had never called his poetical fury a
beloved madness; nor Plato placed the raptures of poets, prophets, and
lovers among the chiefest blessings of this life; nor that sibyl in
Virgil called Aeneas' travels mad labors. But there are two sorts of
madness, the one that which the revengeful Furies send privily from hell,
as often as they let loose their snakes and put into men's breasts either
the desire of war, or an insatiate thirst after gold, or some dishonest
love, or parricide, or incest, or sacrilege, or the like plagues, or when
they terrify some guilty soul with the conscience of his crimes; the
other, but nothing like this, that which comes from me and is of all
other things the most desirable; which happens as often as some pleasing
dotage not only clears the mind of its troublesome cares but renders it
more jocund. And this was that which, as a special blessing of the gods,
Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, wished to himself, that he might
be the less sensible of those miseries that then hung over the
commonwealth.