never known to speak; and her whole time was passed at the window of the asylum, with her eyes turned to the sky, from which position she was forcibly drawn to her meals and her bed.

Female madness has been exquisitely personified by Shakspeare, Fletcher, Cowper, and Bloomfield. No poets have exceeded them. What a melancholy picture, too, is that of "Silly Simon," by that stern anatomist, Crabbe!

Zimmerman, in his treatise on Experience in Physic, relates, that when he visited the great hospitals in France, he distinguished in them three kinds of insane persons. The men," says he, "had become so from pride, the girls through love, and the women through jealousy." I alluded to this one day to a medical friend, who, in return, told me that, in his opinion, insanity was a partial and not a total aberration of reason, and that there are as many mental causes for it as there are passions. "The best remedy for all which," continued he, "is kind treatment, constant occupation in the way of exercise and amusement (which induce sleep), and, where it is possible, religious arguments and instruction. The last, however, is exceedingly difficult, for, for the most part, they turn a deaf ear to all arguments and representations of that nature."

It is related in the Memoirs of Baron de Grimm, that a person in the lunatic asylum at Zurich had only one happiness, and that consisted in ringing the bells of the church. Growing old, he was not allowed to perform this office any longer, and he was, in consequence, reduced to despair. But at length summoning resolution to appeal to the master of the works, "I come, sir," said he, "to ask a favour of you. I used to ring the bells-it was the only thing in the world in which I could be useful-but they will allow me to do it no longer. Do me the favour, then, to cut off my head. I cannot do it myself, or I would spare you the trouble." Now I think this

man was much less insane than he who takes pleasure in ravaging countries, sacking towns, and strewing fields with bleeding corses.

Sir George Baker wrote a work on the influence of some of the passions on the mind and body, and on the diseases to which those passions give rise. A counterpart of this picture is still wanting, viz., one describing the effect of bodily diseases on mental affections. I am not aware that there is any adequate work in this department of physiology.

Treated with skill and feeling, nothing in the medical science is dry or repulsive; every phenomenon having its interest and attraction. Can this be said of the practical superintendence of insane persons?

A rich, unfortunate gentleman died lately in our neighbourhood. He was a martyr to that mental stillness of which Dante complained in his youth, attended by an unconquerable despondence. He was enchained, as it were, and all his sensations became at last so exaggerated, that he was an exemplar of that species of melancholy which Austin calls "the cream and quintessence of human adversity." He nevertheless derived great pleasure from music. One day, also, he would be seen working on the highway, like a labourer; on another, picking sticks along the hedgerows: now he would be gathering leaves, now standing with eyes fixed on a horse, a sheep, a cow, or a cloud; now gazing on the water, and now measuring a path. He had a fine collection of exotic plants. In a few weeks all would be cast on the dunghill, and succeeded by some of the most common of our own. Sometimes his house was all elegance; a year or two after it would be all desolation, the walks matted with grass, the trees covered with moss. With these exceptions, he had an elegant and enlightened mind; which was at times, however, so conscious of its irregularity, that he would weep from the dread of becoming insane.

DODSLEY told WARTON, with tears in his eyes, that, sitting by Pope's bedside a short time before his death, POPE inquired what great arm it was he saw coming out of the wall. Pope, however, never laboured under the fear of insanity. COLLINS, too: "What becomes of my poor dear Collins ?" inquired Johnson, in a letter to Warton. "That man is no common loss. The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune and the transitoriness of beauty; but it is more dreadful to consider that understanding may make its appearance and depart; that it may blaze and expire.' In reference to himself, too: "When I survey my past life,* I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body and disturbances of mind very near to madness, which I hope HE that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults and excuse many deficiencies." Johnson had a great dread of his mind falling into ruins. BRADLEY, also: he who discovered the apparent motion in the fixed stars called the aberration, and the causes of several other phenomena; he was placid, and indifferent to wealth, honours, and fame; yet, keeping his mind too much in a state of studious exertion, he became, during the latter part of his life, afflicted with a terror of losing some of his faculties. From that calamity, however, he escaped. SWIFT was less fortunate. He greatly feared such a terrible visitation; and, as a relief for others, established a hospital for lunatics. Lord Byron, also, was greatly apprehensive of this calamity; and this he alludes to in one of his letters: "I presume that I shall be in the end, if not earlier, like Swift-dying at top! I confess I do not contemplate this with so much horror as he apparently did some years before it happened."

Byron, with all his great powers, was an unfortunate man. In the hands of a Fenelon he had perhaps surpassed human nature; under the govern* Johnson's Prayers and Meditations, p. 155.

ment of himself, he developed the strength and the imbecilities of boyhood, manhood, and age. The greatest of his misfortunes seems to have been, that he associated with scarcely one mind that was not inferior to his own.

Remove the force that bends the sword, and it recovers its straightness as if it never had been bent; and watch-springs retain their elasticity at the distance even of a hundred years. But it is not so

with mind:

"Een as a broken mirror, which the glass

In every fragment multiplies; and makes

A thousand images of one, that was

The same, and still the more, the more it breaks :
And thus the heart will do, which not forsakes
Living in shatter'd guise, and still, and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is cold,

Showing no visible sign; for such things are untold."

Purcell was greatly pleased with setting mad songs to music: a circumstance accounted for by the scope which they afforded to his genius of expressing the strongest passions in their most unrestrained form.

Five or six days ago, walking near the new church in Woburn Square, we saw an elderly gentleman looking earnestly at the trees and shrubs. At length, turning round, and seeing us gaze rather intently upon him, "Pray, sirs," said he, "will you be so humane as to tell me really the truth? Am I in a state of real existence or not?”

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'Certainly, sir,” answered the friend with whom we were walking, "you assuredly are."

"I thank you, sir," replied the old gentleman, with a slight bow. "I have been confined ever since I lost my Jane, and that is now, I suppose, five years; and ever since, that is, to-day, now I walk out, nothing seems to me to be real. I feel as if I could not settle my mind as to the true existence of what I see. I thank you, sir; I will no longer intrude upon you."

Saying this, he walked slowly away; and then we perceived that a person was engaged watching him, near the north end of the square. Unhappy man! thy intellectual life appears to come and go like night and day, summer and winter. There is nothing, I think, so wonderful in this disorder as its lucid intervals and quick returns.

In a small town, situated in one of the most beautiful valleys in Wales, lived a clergyman, possessed of a cultivated mind and taste. I was married by him to a lady who was his parishioner: shortly afterward he remarked to me that he had arrived at the summit of his hopes, and had not a single thing to wish for. I made no answer, but mentally exclaimed, "Then you soon will have!" Years have passed away since this confession. To-day something occurred to render us anxious, and we went into the nursery-plantation in front of our house, and amused ourselves with looking at the myriads of spider's webs that hung from branch to branch, and rescued a multitude of flies and bees that were entangled in them. On returning, we met a friend just arrived from the part of Wales where this clergyman lived, and he informed us that he had lost his wife, and was himself in a house for the confinement of lunatics! Let the happiness of to-day be what it may, who can foretell the vicissitudes of the morrow?

Euripides described madness in a very masterly manner; and for this he is greatly celebrated by Longinus. No poet, indeed, was ever more deeply skilled than Euripides in the pathology of the soul. The madness of Medea is dreadful; that of Hercules awful; while the picture of Orestes, begun by Eschylus and finished by this poet, is one of the most sublime the imagination has ever figured to the mind. There is, I believe, nothing equal to it in the whole compass of human thought.

Shakspeare, too, has shown himself not only a master of the sublime, but also of the pathetic, in this most awful department of human ecstasy.