will, for a time to play well his part, and thus disarm all suspicion as to his actual condition of inebriation.

Such is often the state of a person in the incipient stage of insanity, battling courageously, and it may be successfully, with eccentric, unnatural, odd, singular, impure and unhealthy mental impressions, clearly the first beginnings and early manifestations of derangement of mind.

A clergyman of the Church of England, who had led a life of Christian purity and active benevolence, became (as a consequence of over-study) the subject of this type of mental disorder. He was in the habit frequently of knocking his head violently against the mantelpiece, until the skin was covered with contusions, in the fruitless struggle to dissipate the physically impure images, and blasphemous thoughts, that originated involuntarily in his mind. This patient entirely recovered his reason after the lapse of nine months.*

* With what consummate knowledge of the human mind has Dr. Johnson portrayed the incipient stage of insanity, when the intellect, still, to a certain degree, conscious of the dawnings of morbid thought, endeavours to struggle, and, for a time does so successfully, against the suggestions of a disordered and rampant imagination. I refer to his account in "Rasselas" of the astronomer's recognition of, and conflict with, delusive impressions, as well as his description of their eventual and melancholy triumph over his reason. Addressing himself to Imlac, the astronomer says, "I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons; the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the Dog-star, and mitigated the fervours of the Crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests, which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain."

Might not some other cause," said Imlac, "produce this concurrence? The Nile does not always rise on the same day."

"Do not believe," said he, with impatience," that such objections could escape me: I reasoned long against my own conviction, and laboured against truth with the utmost obstinacy. I sometimes suspected myself of madness, and should not have dared to impart this secret but to a man like you, capable of distinguishing the wonderful from the impossible, and the incredible from the false."

Why, sir," said I, "do you call that incredible which you know, or think you know to be true ?"

"Because," said he, "I cannot prove it by any external evidence, and I

In some women the insanity (particularly if it be of the puerperal type) is characterized by a singularly distressing perversion of thought, connected with a morbidly exalted state of the reproductive instincts. The conversation is, in these cases, occasionally tinctured with expressions, from the contemplation of which the unhappy sufferer would, like a sensitive plant, have recoiled when in health. The gentlest of the sex, the purest and most delicate of feminine minds, pious, refined, and cultivated of moral natures, are often, alas! the first to exhibit, when suffering from particular types of mental derangement, this painful moral and psychical degeneration. Such melancholy manifestations of poor human nature, fallen, crushed, perverted, and often destroyed by disease, suggest to the man of the world, medico-psychologist, theologian, and moralist, sources of deep and profound thought, and subjects for grave philosophical meditation. It is, however, consolatory to reflect, that the mind may pass through this terrible and mysterious phase of alienation intact, emerging from the fiery furnace without the slightest remnant of moral taint, injury, or contamination! How true it is that, Thoughts impure May pass through minds of angels and of man

And leave no stain."

When analysing these sad states of morbid idea, distressing forms of disordered emotion, and painful types of excited passion, we are obliged, alas! to confess, that there is very little in connexion with them to elevate, expand, and purify the taste, or to charm, captivate, and enchain the poet's fancy. In this malady, the emotions, sensations, and appetites are unhappily in a melancholy know too well the laws of demonstration to think that my conviction ought to influence another, who cannot, like me, be conscious of its force. I therefore shall not attempt to gain credit by disputation. It is sufficient that I feel this power, that I have long possessed, and every day exerted it."

state of degradation, perversion, and alienation, and, as a general rule, the conversation and conduct of those so afflicted reflect, and are in unison with this derangement of the intellect, and disordered state of the instincts. The reason is dethroned and taken forcibly captive by the animal impulses, and these, when in a state of supremacy, exercise an undisputed and tyrannical sovereignty over the judgment, conscience, and the will. Hence, the sad and distressing tone of thought (as indicated in the conversation,) previously referred to as occasionally observed in attacks of mental derangement, caused by, or complicated with, ovarian irritation, uterine irregularities, and disorders, among very young women, possessing naturally the most refined, innocent, and sensitively organized minds.

Shakspeare, in one of the most touchingly affecting creations of his transcendent genius, threw a poetic charm, a brilliant flood of fancy, around the character of Ophelia,

"Sweet as spring-time flowers,"

so redolent of feminine gentleness, purity, and grace; but ever true to nature, this great magician, and all but inspired poet, could not sacrifice truth to fiction, fancy to fact, and he therefore makes this love-sick girl, during her insane warblings, give utterance to conceptions that never could have suggested themselves to her exquisitely chaste and delicate mind, before it was prostrated and perverted by disease.

* A young woman was seduced in early life and carried off to London. The man with whom she eloped, finding that she had no children, cruelly abandoned her. She became dreadfully depressed in spirits, and ultimately losing her reason, was confined in an asylum. The narrator of the following particulars says, that when he first saw this poor girl she was apparently about eighteen years of age. She had a pretty bouquet of flowers in her hand, and whilst arranging them, like poor Ophelia, she sung very sweetly, snatches of various favourite melodies. On being asked why she left her late habitation, she answered, "Because I was obliged to do so." She was

When addressing herself, almost unconsciously, to the king, in reply to his question, "How do you, pretty lady?" Ophelia, after plaintively exclaiming, "Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be," utters the following rhapsody: ::

"To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,

All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine:

Then up he rose and don'd his cloaths,
And dupt the chamber door,

Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more."

"I have been most careful in the education of my child," said a gentleman, in deep distress, to me one day, whilst listening to the incoherent ravings of his poor daughter (scarcely nineteen years of age!) "She has,"

he continued, "seldom been out of the house, and has only been allowed to associate with our own limited and select circle of friends and relations, all of whom are morally, if not religiously disposed. I never knew a more pure, delicate, and unsophisticated mind than she possessed previously to her illness; and now, when deranged, she manifests an accurate acquaintance, not only with the most corrupt ideas, but with the improper

asked, how she employed her time last night. "I walked all about Dover." What! did you not go to bed ?" "No! no! I could not close my eyes. Give me a strong stick and a nice lantern, and I will be your watchman. Oh, I shall make a very good watchman. You must let me sleep in the day, you know." She had some slips of paper in her hand, and these she called "fairings:" she distributed them among the poultry in the yard, whom she emphatically styled her children. She then commenced singing, "The ocean wide," &c., and then burst out instantaneously into "Push about the joram." Finding at length her little heedless charge of fowls basking in the morning sun, she tenderly exclaimed, but in a wild accent, "My pretty children are all gone to sleep; they have no hard-hearted lovers ;-but I can't sleep. Macbeth has murdered sleep. Ah! he was a naughty man; was he not?" A young man approached her, when somebody observed, "Look, here's your lover come!" Oh, now! do not give me too many lovers, they will break my heart! My fate, you know, is very hard, is it not ?",

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phrases ordinarily used by the most depraved streetwalkers!"

These sad manifestations of perverted and disordered instinct are susceptible of the subjoined explanations:in the first place, we are bound to consider the orthodox scriptural doctrine of the innate corruption and natural depravity of the human heart. The prophet Jeremiah says, that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"* Again, our Saviour himself declares, “that out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false-witness, blas phemies."+

As long as reason reigns supreme, and is unclouded by disease, and whilst the will retains its normal and healthy sovereignty over the higher faculties of the mind, and its control of the instincts, the natural tendency that exists towards evil thoughts and vicious actions is kept, by man's own efforts, aided, if not happily by Divine Grace, by exalted moral considerations, in a state of subjugation; but contemporaneously with a paralysis of the co-ordinating principle (the executive element of mind), and a perversion of the reasoning faculty, caused by some type of physical, it may be, cerebral disease, does the effect of early training, educational discipline, carefully cultivated habits of thought, strictly, considered social companionship, and zealously directed moral and religious influences, cease, alas! (in many cases) to restrain the passions, and curb the animal instincts and appetites. Hence, the painful character of the expressions almost unconsciously used by some young women when insane.‡

† St. Matthew, chap. xv. v. 9.

*Jeremiah, chap. xvii. v. 9. "Why need we talk of a fiery hell? If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel, from the anarchy of our powers."-Coleridge's "Table Talk.”