It could not be expected that Neal, with whatever fortitude he might
bear his other afflictions, could bear such tranquillity like a hero. To
say that he bore it as one, would be to basely surrender his character;
for what hero ever bore a state, of tranquillity with courage? It
affected his cutting out! It produced what Burton calls "a windie
melancholie," which was nothing else than an accumulation of courage
that had no means of escaping, if courage can without indignity be ever
said to escape. He sat uneasy on his lap-board. Instead of cutting out
soberly, he nourished his scissors as if he were heading a faction; he
wasted much chalk by scoring his cloth in wrong places, and even caught
his hot goose without a holder. These symptoms alarmed, his friends, who
persuaded him to go to a doctor. Neal went, to satisfy them; but he knew
that no prescription could drive the courage out of him--that he was too
far gone in heroism to be made a coward of by apothecary stuff. Nothing
in the pharmacopoeia could physic him into a pacific state. His disease
was simply the want of an enemy, and an unaccountable superabundance of
friendship on the part of his acquaintances. How could a doctor remedy
this by a prescription? Impossible. The doctor, indeed, recommended
bloodletting; but to lose blood in a peaceable manner was not only
cowardly, but a bad cure for courage.
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