Explore "Rabelais and Luther" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I think with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born in the same year.[1] Glorious spirits! glorious spirits!
-- -- "Hos utinam inter / Heroas natum me!"
[Footnote 1: They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding. -- ED.]
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied," says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness, -- yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain, -- namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit. "