Book excerpt: Excerpt from Six Fools Gruff, gloomy, pessimistic, dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle once described the pop ulation of England as consisting of so many millions, who were mostly fools. Carlyle must have been suffering from one of his numerous attacks of indigestion when he gave vent to that savage utter ance, or possibly one of his sleepless nights had somewhat disturbed his mental equi librium. From whatever cause the ex plosion came, his percentage is confessedly much too high for the number of fools in England's population or in that of any other civilized country. If we receive, however, the generally accepted definition for a fool, that he is a person deficient in judgment, who acts stupidly or absurdly, or pursues a course contrary to the dic tates of wisdom, then we must admit that fools form a considerable number in the population of every civilized land. Something over a hundred times the word. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.