' On reading this passage I
was anxious to ascertain its date; but this, on turning to the title page,
I found thus mysteriously expressed: 'in the 7000th year of Astronomical
History, and the first day of Intellectual Life or Moral World, from the
era of this work.' Another slight indication of craziness appeared in a
notion which obstinately haunted his mind that all the kings and rulers of
the earth would confederate in every age against his works, and would hunt
them out for extermination as keenly as Herod did the innocents in
Bethlehem. On this consideration, fearing that they might be intercepted
by the long arms of these wicked princes before they could reach that
remote Stewartian man or his precursor to whom they were mainly addressed,
he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their
importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from
damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the
earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact
to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the
tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus, if
the truth was not to be dispersed for many ages, yet the knowledge that
here and there the truth lay buried on this and that continent, in secret
spots on Mount Caucasus--in the sands of Biledulgerid--and in hiding-
places amongst the forests of America, and was to rise again in some
distant age and to vegetate and fructify for the universal benefit of
man,--this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to
generation; and, in defiance of a myriad of kings crusading against him,
Walking Stewart was to stretch out the influence of his writings through a
long series of [Greek: _lampadophoroi_] to that child of nature whom
he saw dimly through a vista of many centuries.
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