Mackay moves from stock schemes to tulips without batting an eyelash. The apparently unexplainable madness around tulips does relate to commerce, though. Specifically, throughout the middle of the 1630s the now iconic flower was a hot commodity in the Dutch market.
Mackay is sure to note his surprise that such mania could seize "so prudent a people as the Dutch" (93). A detail that once again dates his miscellany.
Nonetheless, moving past the Victorian English perspective of Mackay, The Madness of Crowds' value is made clear in this brief chapter.
This book's not just a relic of another century; this book is a memento of a Europe more extrinsically drawn in deep and differing colours.
Not to mention Mackay's propensity for flashing his vocabulary. I'd nearly forgotten about good old "repast," surrounded as we are in the everyday with the salt-less "meal."
Forget all the new corn that comes from old fields, sometimes that old almost forgotten corn from those same fields is even more interesting.
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