Made Poets

30 Art. III.? No. 2. This wretched brain gave way, And I became a wreck, at random driven, “Without one glimpse of reason or of heaven.?Moore. Robert Ferguson, 1750. Religious Melancholia.

The central points in the biography of this unfortunate man of genius are that he is first known as a rollicking student in the University of St. Andrews, nest as an attorney’s clerk, plunging in the intemperance which at one time characterised this class, then as a lunatic in confinement labouring under a mortal disease, and dying at a, comparatively early age. He entered the university an incarnation of fun, folly, and frolic ; and it is suspected that he utilised the classic groves of Academe for pensive loitering and golf-playing, that the Muses of his in- spiration were chiefly the laughing Clio, the dancing Thalia, the heaven-yclep’d Euphrosyne. He received his education gratuit- ously, but hung out from his bedroom window a purse, to indicate his affluence, was instinct with mirth and mischief, quizzed his professors, tormented the liall-porter, wrote an elegy on this official, but had displayed so much gentleness and geniality of disposition in his persecutions that the supposed defunct described him as a ” tricky callant, but a fine laddie for a’ that.” Touched to the quick by an allusion to the sliabbiness of his dress, from those with whom he resided, to the effect that a visit to the tailor was more necessary than a visit from the Muses, the theological aspirant is next met with absorbed amid the deeds and dust of the commissary clerk of the Scotch metropolis, dreaming more of Crambo Clink than of engrossing. His compositions were couched in a Scotch dialect less mellifluous and colloquial than that of Burns, perhaps because he restricted himself to its exclusive use, got up its Doricisms and Scotticisms at a time when they were passing into disuse and regarded as vulgar. It is painful to watch the death of a language, especially if it contains relics of Anglo-Saxon and far-distant antiquity. Scotch is evidently doomed to early extinction by gentility, fusion of races, &c., and political economists will rejoice o’er its premature decay. The present time and causes still in operation have swept away many similar vestiges of perishing peoples. It is said that about 100 years ago an old woman in Truro spoke the ori- ginal British tongue. This must have been Graelic; and now, notwithstanding the galvanisation of Professor Blackie, it is already extinct, or has migrated to America. Anthropologists are prone to stigmatize the Celt as an irreclaimable savage, as denied the survival of the fittest, as doomed to extinction or to fusion with nobler or more durable races. Can this bold denunciation or prophecy be advertised while we look on the recent ruler of the destinies of France, the representative of that heroic army of exiles who left their country, their hopes, their future, in loyalty to a fugitive prince, a ruined cause; or upon that descendant of some humble emigrant from the banks of the Spey, who recently led the armies of America to war, and then led them back to peace, and who is now gathering honours and the allegiance of all English-speaking freemen? But the names of MacMalion and Grant may in the mind of the caviller embody nothing more than the barbarian virtues which find expression in the charge, the chase, the carousal; assuredly they pale in the minds of all beside the names of Macaulay and Murchison, of the profound and eloquent exponent of history and of its heroes, and of the exponent of the structure, the progress, the duration of the world we inhabit. We are not certain but that to many he who painted with such exquisite? we might write patriotic?taste and success the ” land of the mountain and the flood,” and that most characteristic feature of its brae-sides, the bowers of birk, Macculloch, or that she who has transmitted to us the lilts and lays which long re- sounded among- the birchin shaws as the lament for ” the good old creed and the good old cause,” and still linger as remnants of national melody, the Countess of Nairn, may not hold a higher and more endearing rank in the records of Celtic achievement. The craving for sudden and brief excitement so often claimed as a virtue is manifested under the form of vice in Celtic tendencies. The sluggish temperament may require an arti- ficial stimulant ere it can he roused into enthusiasm or sono Though attaining great prominence in our social system as statesmen, poets, philosophers, and men of renins wl exercising a robust and healthy influence over our national life, the Scotch have ceased to be a separate people, and the doom of their language is sealed. Yet I have listened to Scotch in pulpit, bar, bench, and in polished society, and now it cannot be heard except in lyrics, sung by our grandmothers, or by damsels at ” our ewes milking,” if such a picturesque practice still exists in the ” land of the mountain and the flood.” As Ferguson’s promotion in his master’s office involved some of the duties of a tipstaff, he retained his position with narrow emoluments and narrower enjoyments. The latter consisted chiefly in the jollifications of some cellar tavern, where we can conceive that his own songs formed a staple supply of delight and drollery, tavern orgies which in a humbler and ranker form may be supposed to have resembled those described by Sir Walter Scott as ” high jinks.” How far these meetings were ac- companied with excess and intemperance is not now known ; but in every relation of life he seems to have secured kindness, and friendship, and love. The excitement, fatigue, and exposure of what is designated by some of his biographers as the ” in- temperate scenes of a country election,” while he was under medical treatment proved too much for his delicate frame, and with the seeds of common catarrh were sown those of a more formidable affection of the nervous system. The symp- toms were those of religious melancholia ; and all attempts to restore reason and tranquillity by home treatment having failed, he was consigned to the rude and wretched Bedlam of the city, which had been constructed from the ruins of the offices erected by the promoters of the Darian scheme, in itself as wild and extravagant a delusion as ever flitted athwart the imagination of any of the inmates ultimately confined within its walls. There are two observations which are entitled to introduction at this point. The first is, that a very large number of poets, ranging from Cowley, Etheridge, Parnell, Denham, Lee, Moore, to those of lesser repute, have, either directly or indirectly, fallen victims to intoxication, seeking in it the dreamland or fairyland which the Indian finds in his liaschisch, or the stimulation which over-taxed fancy may crave, or the temporary realisation of what their pen has described; and secondly, that in the depression which poets and a large proportion of men of imaginative mind experience may be discovered at once the provocative to stimulation, the ever-recurring palliation of excess, and the commencement of that series of emotive changes which renders the members of this class so prone to various degrees of moral unsoundness, if not to actual alienation. May not dejection or penitential despondency be the basis of dipsomania, and even of the repeated paroxysms of habitual drunkenness ?

In the squalid, turfless airing-yard around this once lordly, but even then half-ruined mansion, of which Ferguson was an inmate, there stood until lately a solitary willow-tree, at the root of which ?for its branches afforded no shade?he is de- scribed as often sitting with his book. But these calmer moments were but the prelude of rapid decay. It is probable that the poor invalid died of phthisis, and that the close of life might be cheered by that bright though deceptive gleam of hope so often present in this disease. Be this as it may, his actual departure was sad and sorrowful. ” A few days before his dissolution, his mother and sister found him lying on his straw bed, calm and collected. The evening was chill and damp ; he requested his mother to gather the bed-clothes about him and sit on his feet, for he said they were so cold as to be almost insensible to the touch. She did as he requested, and his sister took her seat by the bedside. He looked wist- fully in his mother’s face, and said, ‘ Oh, mother, this is kind.’ Then addressing his sister, he said, ‘ Might you not come frequently and sit beside me ? You cannot imagine how comfortable it would be. You might fetch your seam, and sit beside me.’ The mother and sister answered only with tears and sobs. ‘ What ails you ?’ said the dying poet; ‘ why sorrow for me ? I am very well cared for here, and want for nothing?only it is cold, very cold. You know I told you it would come to this at last. Oh, do not go yet, mother?I hope to be soon?oh, do not go yet! do not leave me !’ But the keeper motioned that the time was past, and they must depart. They never again saw Robert Ferguson in life. He was found a few mornings thereafter dead in his cell.” * The hardness and desertion here detectable were not necessarily signs of cruelty or indifference. The custodians of the insane a hundred years ago feared their patients and fled from them; or, regarding them as possessed by Satan or his emissaries, they fettered, it may be flogged, they chained, starved, stupefied, in order to subdue; subjugation being in such eyes the first step towards cure. Burns writes:?

Ill-fated genius !?heaven-taught Ferguson ! “What heart that feels and will not shed a tear, To think life’s sun did set ere well begun To shed its influence on thy bright career. Oh! why should truest worth and genius pino Beneath the iron grasp of want and woe, While titled knaves and idiot greatness shine In all the splendour fortune can bestow ?

In touching so lightly upon the failings and temptations to which Ferguson was exposed, it must be notorious that they were the characteristics not merely of the class to which he belonged, but of the time in which he lived. Perhaps no educated man was distinguished by absolute sobriety, certainly none were abstainers. In my view of the subject, the craving for stimulants has become at different periods epidemic, as have many other appetites, passions, and peculiari- ties. There seems to be a rising, a falling, and a full tide in the vice or the disease of intemperance. There are waves of increase and decrease, and it has been affirmed that we are threatened with a deluge. In examining the very curious statistics submitted to the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the subject, these alternations are discoverable, although on the whole the maxim of indulgence has never reached so alarming a height as at present. Political economists declare that these changes depend upon the rise and fall of wages, and that the blessings of prosperity and abundant earnings always entail the danger, and at present the curse, of intoxication and degeneracy. This law may affect the industrial classes, but it cannot affect the community generally, as in the upper strata of society where no such fluctuations in income occur, and where the tendency to luxury in other respects has been most marked during the last fifty years, drunkenness, even deep drinking, are almost unknown.

The works left by Ferguson consist chiefly of eclogues, elegies, addresses to external nature, &c., and, considering his tempera- ment and tendencies, it has been thought curious that so few expressions of a sensuous or a voluptuous kind are to be found in his writings. Not as a critical discovery but as a psycho- logical fact, it should be mentioned that neither Coleridge, Wordsworth, nor Southey, all of them philosophical, if not metaphysical poets, and rich in feeling, abound in amorous epithets or addresses, not even in the higher manifestations of love. Yet the latter seems to have inspired even in his senile decay sentiments of the most exquisite devotion and self- sacrifice, of which his second marriage is a glorious proof. Charles Fenno Hoffman (New York, United States), 1806. Mania Errdbunda.

I he life of this poet reminds me of Turner’s landscapes, where the elements are few and simple, the composition un- elaborate, and where large portions require to be filled up by the imagination. His mind-picture may be said to consist of a passionate and picturesque love and admiration for tlie woods and wilds, the haunts and habits of the children on the prairie and the hunting path, as they were retiring before eastern civilisation, and of a keen appreciation and power of representation of all that was romantic or beautiful in the history and pursuits and ultimate fate of those aborigines, while all the background on the canvas has to be occupied by the melancholy and monotony of twenty-five years in a mad-liouse. If Cooper was the annalist, Hoffman may be styled the poet of the Mohawks, Hurons, Iroquois, and all the nobler and gentler tribes before they were corrupted and annihilated by fire-water, vicious contamination, imported disease, and by manners and customs to which they fail to adapt themselves. He was a graft between the wild and the acclimatised vine. Alas that the memory of a spirit which understood and had almost mingled with the best and purest feelings of both races should have almost passed away with the children of the desert, except when a pensive tribute is awarded by a kindred heart (Bryant), and when some of the songs, such as ” Monterey,” and ” Sparkling and Bright,” are sung by those who know nothing of their origin!

From the college he passed to the desk of a lawyer, but, impatient both of learned and legal logic, he when a lad of sixteen seems to have emancipated himself from all thraldom, engaged in literary contributions to periodicals, and subsequently in a sort of nomadic life which combined the stimulus of some slight degree of danger with an introduction to some of the most genial as well as some of the grandest scenes of his then only partially settled country. The first and most pronounced instance of this love of adventure and unreclaimed nature occurred in 1833, when, on horseback and alone, he traversed many of the north-west and south-west states, encountering, perhaps courting, hardship, discomfort, snowstorm, and every vicissitude of weather. He was proud of this exploit, and published a narrative of his journey ; but, according to a rela- tive, he was afterwards constantly to be found on the waters or on the banks of the magnificent Hudson, and in the regions where his enthusiastic admiration of external nature and his interest in the Indian hunters who still lingered amid the primeval woods might be gratified. A very large portion of his verses exhale the very odour, repeat the musical sounds, paint the shade of the forest and the gleam of the fresh and sweeping savannahs, which he preferred to the marts of commerce or the busy hum of his fellow-men; and we find that about one-half of his published poems are devoted to 44 Forest Musings ” and

” Lays of the Hudson,” while many others commemorate events or scenes upon the border-lands between the allocations of the Red and White Man. They are the productions of a man of great sensibility with a poet’s lip and a painter’s hand, but not of great originality of genius.

This craving for solitude occasionally combined with vagabondage has been felt or affected by genuine poets as well as poetasters, chiefly of the Byronic or Corsair type. It is not necessarily misanthropical; it ma}7- be a desire for quiet or abstraction, or of a fair, unfrequented spot which the fancy of the dreamer may appropriate as his own, may create into a realm, peopled, idealised, according to his own standard of excellence, and perfect, like the Island and adjoining Continent of the two De Quinceys, or the Jug force of Hartley Coleridge. It may be a transcript from thoughts to the realities around, a study to be reproduced in verse. But generally it is the out- come of a morbid as well as fertile imagination, and I am much tempted to place this wild escape in search of food or fuel for rhyme in the same category with the Grolgotha and Chamber of Horrors, with which Ed. Young surrounded himself when cultivating the dark and the dismal.

Charles Lamb, 1775. Melancholia Mania. (Folie Circulaire.) It is a true but tattered shred of old wisdom that there is a skeleton., often many, in every home; but it should be added, that domestic virtue, peace, pleasure so colour and conceal the habitual shame, scandal, spectre, that it is generally unfeared, unnoticed, unknown. The ancient Egyptians carried their mummified grandfathers to banquets, but the wizened corpses svere swathed in gold and gems, and perfumed. Then there are noble sacrifices as well as terrible tragedies in cellars and garrets as well as in palaces and high places. It is but yester- day that Lally de Tollendal, the descendant of the grand chivalrous defender of Louis XVI., rushed from wretchedness in his cellar and shot himself in our streets. Here, too, is a poor clerk, living ? in an obscure part of London, amid meagre and vulgar surroundings ; queer and quakerish in person and aspect, methodical and precise in habits and manners to the extent of always going to work by the same street, hanging his hat upon the same peg, gazing for the same number of hours upon nearly the same columns of figures, quaint in thought and expression, kind, gentle, and affectionate in nature, who stands forth a poet, a martyr, a hero.

It is probable that the gifts and goodness of Charles Lamb have been over-estimated, hyperbolically described by the crowd of friends, followers, worshippers, almost all of them men of genius, high culture, and discrimination ; it is probable that much of the beauty and nobleness which are interwoven with his life and literary efforts are due to the intimate association with these very men, by reflection, or were imparted by intercommunion growing with the growth and embellishment of his peculiar powers ; it is affirmed that kindred living in close intimacy grow like each other in face, in features, and in expression ; it is certain that such intercourse casts the manners, tastes, opinions in the same mould, and it is probable that Lamb caught some rays of pleasantness and imagination from those in whose intellectual treasures he was constantly sharing, while liis own angularities, sinuosities, and sensibilities remained untouched ; but certain it is that this lover of all that was pure and perfect? this reveller in unexpected affinities, odd antitheses, out-of-the- way topics, traits, and peculiarities?was, in defiance of his misfortunes, in despite of his errors, almost because of his eccentric imagination, one who appealed and still appeals to those of the finest taste and warmest sympathies. His course may be arranged into stages or chapters. There was first his early, close, and long-continued intimacy with Coleridge. They had been schoolfellows together at Christchurch. They were linked together by similarity of tastes, sentiments, pursuits, and this at a season when both were young and fresh and un- invaded by disease. They were besides connected in their first literary adventure; but it is worthy of note that of all engaged in this voyage of discovery?Lamb, C. Lloyd, Coleridge?the wits were lost or went astray in worthless wool-gathering. The second era consisted in the invasion of insanity. Of its origin little is known except that the sufferer was sensitive, susceptible, and peculiar, occasionally presented strangeness of manner, was subject to involuntary muscular contractions, tremor of lip, stammering, irritability, though his ire, like summer lightning, was brief, bright, innocent; that he branched from a morbid stem ; that of the personages who appear in his life-drama his father was an exacting dotard, his mother paraplegic, his sister a paroxysmal, homicidal maniac, and that a stolid brother lived apart and perhaps aloft from this sad family group.* His noble forehead, bis glittering eyes, bave been alluded to, but bis whole aspect was such as to attract notice. He has been further represented as theological, metaphysical, perplexed, despondent. But even where no positive morbidity could be detected, he was ever betraying ” out-of-the-way humours and opinions,” and confessed that ” heads with some diverting twist” were most gratifying to him. It is very strange that Talfourd should have placed his melancholic above his humorous vein, but it is quite possible that both sides of his character were perfectly and equally natural. In a letter to Coleridge, he has written freely, even sportively, of the first attack of madness of which we hear. ” I know not what suffer- ing scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agree- ably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite anyone. But mad I was! And many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all were told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which if I finish I publish… . The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry ; but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid intervals.

TO MY SISTER.

If from my lips some angry accents fell, Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, ‘Twas but the error of a sickly mind And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well, And waters clear, of Eeason ; and for me Let this my verse the poor atonement be? My verse, which thou to praise wert e’er inclined Too highly, and with a partial eye to see No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show Kindest affection ; and wouldst oft-times lend An ear to the desponding, lovesick lay, Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. The next stage consists in the frightful catastrophe, the culmination of his destiny, when, in a sudden outburst of blind fury, his insane sister plunged a carving knife into the bosom of their helpless mother, and killed her instantly; both the victim and the parricide remaining unconscious of the nature of the event. That this sanguinary deed did not overturn Lamb’s reason, that he had nerve-force sufficient to resist the horrors of the moment and its long train of consequences, is marvellous ; but that it exercised a powerful influence over his moral nature, bis sympathy, and responsibility was obvious ; he felt that it pronounced his doom, that for him animal pleasure, love?and a filmy love-passage had passed across his life-dream ?marriage, home, were all as shadows, and that the care and custody or kindly disposal of his maniac charge was the whole aim and object and duty which remained.

That we never many our first love is sad. That we never marry any love until we have imbued her with the bloom and beauty of the first, is sadder.

The violet eye, the tinted cheek, the graces of the childish form, must encircle with an auriole of first impressions the mature and matronly sharer in the commonplace, perhaps vapid or vulgar events of ordinary life. The sparkling miniature expands into the full-length; it is veneered with the more delicate polish of romance. Can it be possible that Dante’s Beatrice, Spenser’s Rosalind, Petrarch’s Laura, Beranger’s Lysette?a serving-wench seen through an auriole, or a score of blooming ” grisettes ” rolled into one?and, lastly, Burns’s Mary, are dreams, deliriums, delusions, creations of fancy, that never lived nor loved, that rose up from some remembered image, or were created in the depths of consciousness, stimulated the imagination, elevated the sentiment, and wafted the pure and pious adoration to the very verge of heaven ? Can it be con- ceived that the supernatural Laura glided shadow-like through the domestic circle, side by side with the earth-born, care- stricken wife of the poet ? Is it credible that the angelic Laura occupied a niche in the temple of Petrarch’s genius and heart close to the mother of his children, who was neither wife nor saint nor seraph ? Is it credible that from the same fountain there flowed the gross pollutions?we almost wrote obscenities ??of the Jolly Beggars, and the pure and prayer-like invocations to Mary in heaven ? It is noteworthy that the delusions of insane monks ever led to union with the Virgin, while those of insane nuns depicted espousals of the Bride of the Saviour. We have had female lunatics who, misguided hj no special teaching nor prescribed ecstasies or reveries, claimed in sacri- legious idea, even in concupiscence, to be united in marriage with the Lamb.

Then came in Lamb’s career a long interval of quiet, almost happy enjoyment, during which his spirit gave forth the sweet and elegant utterances of ” Elia,” during which his humble ambitions were gratified after his own fashion, during which his fame and fortune spread greatly in breadth and depth, if not in elevation, and during which he collected around him in his Hogarth room, and library of first and rare editions, albeit garrets, the grandest groups of authors, thinkers, poets, philosophers that ever met in converse, or yielded their fealty in friendship as well as in admiration to a fellow-worker (Godwin, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge). It is not to the credit of biographers, it shakes our trust in the fidelity of such portraits, when the wrinkles, the scars, the ugliness of the countenance are omitted, as when the habits of intem- perance contracted by Lamb at this time, or earlier, are euphemized or omitted ; except where the anxiety displayed by his sister on seeing him mix even a second glass during an animated discussion may be alluded to.

This is the veiled skeleton, the gilded mummy. It reminds us of draped or coloured statuary, of those caricature photographs where the mitred, perhaps the glory-crowned head of a saint is connected with the rude and vulgar trunk and habiliments of a commonplace mortal. It was perhaps natural, even excusable, that a craving for stimulants should arise, that relief and oblivion should be sought from the blight and burden that ever oppressed; nay, excitement or intoxication may have been but the analogue or substitute of that moral poison which lurked within his veins, but the fact should have been told. It is sad to think that Lamb’s latter days were not of the calm and pleasant sort described by his friend. A great tenderness, and delicacy, or friendly sensitiveness, has kept back from the account of Lamb’s history much which concerned the horrid spectre which attended him all through his life. We are led to believe that in time that great and dreadful trouble had been softened for him, and had as it were faded out, and that the evening of his days had been calm and tranquil. This at least would be the impression on reading the account of his closing days at Edmonton. But it is said, and it is vouched for by good authority, that not long before he died he and his sister had been placed at Enfield in a house called Bay Cottage with a woman named Kedford, who was accustomed to take charge of deranged persons. It is said that both required restraint, and that the woman of the place treated them cruelly, often locking up brother and sister together in a closet during some of their fits. There are those who recollect having seen Mary Lamb at a window tearing up a feather bed, and scattering the feathers in the air. Fortunately, friends found out the pitiable state of things, and Charles was removed in time to Edmonton, where he could die in peace. For this last scene of all, which has been presented by only one autho- rity, has been substituted the picture of a quiet, turf-clad grave in Islington Churchyard, visited daily for eleven long years by a pensive sister, who ultimately rested beside the precious dust. Individuals have been haunted for years with the dread of impending derangement; the phantom being so near and so real that it mingled with and darkened every joy and hope, passed into their dreams, ultimately converting the apprehen- sion into a reality. The substance followed the shadow, the dread became the cause of the disease. But not only must Lamb have had a keen sense of the instability of his own tenure of sanity, but there brooded over him the hideous chimsera of his sister’s periodic frenzy and violence, she sharing with him a forecast of Bethlem. His letters show that either as an anticipation or a retrospect her illness and suffering were ever vividly present. His whole conduct, his domestic arrange- ments, his simple financial provisions, were regulated by the scale of her mental tranquillity, by her seclusion in an asylum, by her temporary return and resumption of household duties. So precarious was her condition, so minute the foresight and precautions against her repeated attacks, that whenever he accompanied her to the country or elsewhere, a strait waistcoat formed part of the contents of his portmanteau. That the unfortunate patient herself had some premonitions of an approaching paroxysm, that these intimations consisted of depression and melancholy rather than agitation, and that she voluntarily adopted the course advised by wise and humane friends, may be inferred from the circumstance that the poet and his charge were not sorrowful and weeping but calm on their way to the asylum in which the latter found rest and refuge so often. That, staggering under all such anxieties and difficulties, with a dark and lowering future, with few of the pleasurable supports or solaces by which men usually divert ?r dilute the cares and the cankers which oppress them, he should have extracted the precious from the baser metal, the picturesque from the sordid, the ungainly, the awkward, the romantic from the commonplace; that he should have imparted gentleness and joy, and even mirth, to all who listened to him flowing in a pure, continuous stream through the contorted and poisoned, though not polluted channels of his invention, except during a spasmodic pang following his mother s murder, when he burned his MSS., and forswore composition and books, is one of those triumphs which genius alone can accom- plish. But let us analyse his springs of character more closely. He did possess solaces of a lofty kind in religious feeling, in the perception of the beautiful and the true, and in the calls of a great and glorious duty.

Nathaniel Lee, 1657. Mania?(Dipsomania ?).

This unfortunate but celebrated dramatist invited prema- ture decay and death, it may be, by the fire and fury of his temperament, by the malign and morbid influence of con- stitutional tendencies, and assuredly by participation in the loose and licentious manners and habits prevalent and popular beyond as well as in his profession. Yet he spent his early years in the healthy quiet of a parsonage ; he was a West- minster boy, and completed his education at Trinity College, Cambridge. At this stage, however, on the beaten and orthodox highway trodden by our senators, Solons, and upper ten thousand, he deviated from the accustomed route, and after the in- variable apprenticeship of play-going and play-writing, he appeared upon the stage. Here, like others of higher genius and pretensions of the same order, he proved a lamentable almost a ludicrous failure, and turned from the attempt to represent imaginary characters drawn by others to what proved the more genial and successful task of drawing and highly colouring characters which might be and were represented by others. He composed ” Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow “Nero;” ” Grloriana, or the Court of Augustus Csesar;” “Alexander ” Mithridates” Theodosius;” ” Csesar Borgia ” Lucius Junius Brutus ” Constantine” CEdipus ” Duke of Guise;” ” Massacre of Paris ” Princess of Cleves all of which possessed a certain amount of merit, which did not, however, save them from oblivion. Certain of his tragedies were the offspring of his lusty youth, certain of his maturer years, if he ever reached such; some were written when he was the companion and compotator of the wits and men of fashion who haunt the green-room or the tavern, and partake intensely of the inspiration of slashed doublets and gin twist, while others were the product of long and painful and repeated seclusion in the cells of Bedlam. It was his fate to present his works to the pit and the public in an age of platitudes, of coldness, stiffness, starchedness; of critics who measured lines and prosed as to the unities rather than dug out the golden ores of genius ; who were divided into cliques and clans, and actuated by jealousies, antipathies, and petty am- bitions, of which the present generation can form no conception. They were doubtless gratified in dooming and denouncing the plays of poor Lee, but he secured not merely the approbation of Addison, who commends his genius highly, observing ” that none of our English poets had a happier turn for tragedy, although his natural fire and unbridled impetuosity hurried him beyond all bounds of probability, and sometimes were quite out of nature but Dr den couches a eulogy in poetry: ? Such praise is jours ; while you the passions move, That ‘tis no longer feigned, ‘tis real love, Where nature triumphs over wretchod art; We only warm the head, but you the heart. Always you warm! and if the rising year, As in hot regions, bring the sun too near, ‘Tis but to make your fragrant spices blow, Which in our colder climates will not grow. These praises chiefly refer to the tragedy of ” Alexander,” which is the only one of the long series which has obtained a permanent place in our modern theatre. It is scarcely con- ceivable but that an author whose thoughts flowed for nearly his whole lifetime through channels of rhythmical and poetic expression, who rarely descended from his tragic stilts, and seems to have been as familiar with the histrionic art and ex- citement in his closet as on the boards, and who must have made the highest and purest models of dramatic literature his study and science, coidd have avoided the composition of beautiful and attractive passages. Many of these may be discovered in his works surrounded or overlaid by baser and grosser concomitants ; but one example may suffice :? There’s heaven still in thy voice ; but that’s a sign Virtue’s departing, for thy better angel Still makes the woman’s tongue his rising ground, Wags there awhile, and takes his flight for ever.

But it must be confessed that in few of the rejected adven- turers in the drama are to be found so many objectionable lines and epithets as in Lee, and that in none of the class of writers to which these observations apply are there so many proofs? symptoms they may be styled?of the malady under which they laboured. These indications consist, mainly, in the repulsive subjects selected, in the sensational, sanguinary, or melodra- matic manner in which they are treated, and above all in the wild, extravagant, exaggerated, and absurd dialogue adopted. Lee appears either to have been constantly mad, or to have been subject to recurrent insanity which necessitated repeated seclusion, and to have retained a certain amount of the taint and excitement of his alienation even when at liberty. The ” Massacre of Paris ” and the ” Princess of Cleves ” have been adduced even by his biographers in illustration of this perma- nent perversion of the imagination.

What would our present playgoers say to the following stage direction ??

” The scene draws, and discovers a heaven of blood, two suns, spirits in battle, arrows shot to and fro in the air, cries of yielding persons, &c. : cries of ‘ Carthage is fallen,’ &c. or such manifestations of hatred and defiance :? Were I in heaven, and saw him scorched in flames, I would not spit my indignation down, Lest I should cool his tongue. Or:?

Now by your wrongs, that turn my heart to steel, Well could I curse away a winter’s night, Though standing naked on a mountain’s top, And think it hut a minute spent in sport. These quotations must not be regarded as isolated passages; similar apostrophes recur in every page, and form legitimate characteristics of the style of the author, especially towards the close of his career. Although Lee does not appear to have even coquetted with comedy, nor is there evidence that he indulged in satire or farce, yet grim jokes have lingered about the gloomy abodes of his frenzied life that go to show he was not incapable of either. It is recounted that when in Bedlam he wittily replied to a coxcomb scribbler, who had the cruelty to jeer him with his misfortune, by observing that it was an easy thing to write like a madman, ” No; it is not an easy thing to write like a madman, but it is very easy to write like a fool.” In the same place, but upon another occasion when writing one of his tragedies, his candle, granted by some extraordinary extension or breach of asylum discipline, went out, and provoked by the obscuration of the feeble light from without by the passing clouds, he is reported to have shouted, in folly or in frolic, ” Jupiter, snuff the moon.” Of the cause or circumstances of his death no precise information has been preserved except that he perished at the early age of twenty- four ” in a night ramble ” in the streets of London.* Charles Lloyd.

(Circa 1780.) Melancholia (Paroxysmal). As withered flower leaves have been found enshrined in amber, as the fame of annotators has depended chiefly upon the works which they criticised, and as the faithfulness and friendship of Boswell have been preserved by his gossip on the grander qualities of Johnson, so the name, and fame, and misfortunes of the poet Charles Lloyd are confined exclusively to the sympathetic writings of a celebrated contemporary. His name is not to be found in Biographical Dictionaries; his works do not form part of our libraries ; and except where allusions have dropped from the lips and pen of Coleridge and Lamb, the very existence of C. L. as a man of genius, and as the intimate friend and fellow-labourer of two of the most cele- brated men of the past generation would be unknown. About 1795 the publication of a volume of poems was projected by this triumvirate, buoyant with inspiration and hope and the energies of youth, which was to contain contributions from each; but I have not seen the work, and introduce the circumstance to show the high appreciation of the powers of C. L. by his associates. The first intimation of Lloyd’s mental infirmity appears in the following passage in a letter from Lamb to Coleridge :?” Poor dear L.! I had a letter from him yesterday; his state of mind is truly alarming. He has, by his own confession, kept a letter of mine un- opened three weeks, afraid, he says, to open it, lest I should speak upbraidingly to him; and yet this very letter of mine was in answer to one wherein he informed me that an alarming illness had alone prevented him from writing.” Statements nearly to the same effect are scattered through the letters of the same author, and there is reason to believe that the malady thus faintly shadowed forth ultimately amounted to derangement requiring confinement, but of the precise progress or issue I am not entitled to speak more confidently than by citing the following pregnant note in the ” Jovial Memorials ” of Lamb. ” Poor Charles Lloyd ! These appre- hensions were sadly realised. Delusions of the most melan- choly kind thickened over his latter days, yet left his admirable intellect free for the finest processes of severe reasoning. At a time when, like Cowper, he believed himself the especial subject of Divine wrath, he could bear his part in the most subtle disquisition on questions of religion, morals, and poetry, with the nicest accuracy of perception and the most exemplary candour ; and, after an argument of hours, revert, with a faint smile, to his own despair !

From another source I have learned that while suffering under profound dejection C. L. was induced, contrary to his inclinations and convictions, to accompany a friend to the theatre. At first he was moody and melancholy; then his attention was arrested; then he followed the plot and movement of the drama, yielded himself up to enjoy the humour of the piece, laughed heartily and. joyously, and returned home cured and convalescent. The signal power, and generally the benefi- cence of mimetic impersonation over those of nervous, espe- cially of excitable and marked nervous temperament, is now generally admitted. In ancient times in a Grecian city, it is narrated, that so exquisitely had insanity been represented 011 the stage that, impelled by the principle of imitation, the inhabitants, or many of tliem, exhibited similar symptoms in the streets. The tendency in actors, of which Mrs. Siddons is the most illustrious and best authenticated example, to subdue their own emotions, characteristics, even their personality, and to become so absorbed in and identified with the character which they represent, that they cannot for long periods emancipate themselves from assumed passions and emotions, is well known. Such a phenomenon finds a counterpart in the experience of Talma, who, labouring under such permanent delusions as that the pit of the theatre was crowded with skeletons, was able so to concentrate his attention upon his part that he lost all con- sciousness of everything real or imaginary, except the feelings or fancies which he was called upon to embody. About the beginning of the century Esquirol sanctioned the performance of a play before his patients. The drama hinged upon the unjust dethronement of a sovereign by his subjects. Notwith- standing the proximity of the French Revolution, and the influence which its principles must have still exercised over the prejudices and instincts of the audience, the lunatics, roused by the injustice which they had witnessed, rushed upon the stage in order to defend or restore the injured monarch. Though this experiment failed at Charenton, it succeeded sub- sequently at Copenhagen; and for the last forty years farces, vaudevilles, even more pretentious comedies and melodramas, have been regularly enacted by the inmates, sane or insane, of asylums in Scotland, England, America, &c. It is probable that the initiative was suggested by some psychological theory, or, what is still more likely, by the wish to supply amusement; but in the present day the drama has assumed a deserved place as one of the most important agents in moral treatment. Lucretius,

Born in the second year of 171st Olympiad, died aged 44. Mania.

I he analysis of the psychical health of all the thinkers who have adopted the atomic theory from Epicurus to Tyndall would be ripe with interest. The examination would present various modifications of the original or germinal theory, and occasionally chasms which would create difficulties, if not insur- mountable obstacles, to progress. The most conspicuous and perplexing of these would consist in the occasional madness of Lucretius, the greatest of the ancient expositors of the hypo- thesis. It is not a little startling that the great leaders of the scepticism current in the present day, Lucretius and Comte, should both have been lunatics. It would be as illogical to hold these men responsible when sane for what they uttered when insane, as it would be to identify the incoherent fancies of Goethe and Schiller when drunk with the outpourings of their genius when sober, but it cannot be regarded as unreasonable that an inquirer should prefer the convictions of a mind which had never been disturbed or dethroned to those proceeding from an ill-balanced intellect that, at times, had altogether lost its balance. For setting aside all hypercritical definitions of lucid intervals, there must generally exist an uncertainty as to the precise amount of sanity or insanity which may influence the mind at a given time. Lucretius was subject to paroxysmal mania, and the perplexity arising from what may have been the precise value and trustworthiness of his utterances may be gathered from the following explanations and excuses by Bayle. This authority asserts that a philter had been given to him by bis wife, which turned his brain, and it is possible that he may have written poetry while under the influence of the drug, as Tasso certainly did while in a state of alienation, but the safer course is to believe that he had lucid intervals during which he composed his celebrated poem ” De Rerum Natura.” This philosophical treatise has been described as a contradiction of himself and his own opinions, and, in so far as, while inculcating a high standard of morality, he denies boldly the intervention of Divine Providence, and yet acknowledges a something which overthrows human grandeur, this criticism may be accepted as just. He was a physicist apparently vacillating between the doctrines of immortality and annihilation; and swayed, perhaps, by some temporary cause towards the latter, or in vindication of his honest consistency, he committed suicide.

?James Gates Peecival, 1795, Connecticut, United States. Genius, Eccentricity, Melancholia.

It is said that Dr Haslam, while under examination as an ex- pert, made the startling announcement that he had neei known a perfectly sane mind save one. Presumably he had in view the creative mind, the supreme intelligence, the Almighty centre and source of all thought, feeling, sentiment and spiritual power ; and that his proposition was preparatory for certain qualifications and explanations of the conduct of the inferior being, whose manifestations he had been called upon to ana- lyse. Without pursuing the theory of this most practical physician in the direction he intended or indeed further in any direction, it may be perfectly legitimate to hold that to err is human, and that in every human mind there exist so many defects, deformities, disproportions, so much weak- ness and waywardness, as, although not amounting to aliena- tion, nosologically considered, places it at a great distance from a high or even a rigid standard of mental health. It is perfectly allowable to advocate this opinion, which must not be confounded with the hypothesis that idiocy and in- sanity are merely degrees in the development of reason or some other mental power; and to believe that the over- turn of reason is a specific neurose. But passing from this consideration, it is remarkable that so many individuals of genius and intellect should have been detected under the necro- scopic microscope of posthumous memoirs to have cherished in concealment absurd peculiarities, peccadilloes under the exterior garb of wisdom and learning; and it is still more connected with our present purpose to point to the vast number of individuals of ordinary capacity, in the different ranks of society and culture, who inhabit a border land between soundness and unsoundness of mind, who hover between moral health and disease, who occupy a position from which they may be cast down by the slightest disturbance or distress, or the inherent insecurity which may be revealed by circumstances of the most common- place nature, and which would leave the more robust or callous character untouched and unruffled. In this class must be placed Percival. He displayed great versatility of talent, but was destitute of consistency of purpose; he mastered all sciences and subjects, but achieved nothing; he accomplished paradoxi- cal wonders, and deceived himself and even others into the con- viction that he was transcending nature; the companion of poets and philosophers, he must often have been regarded as an eccentric, and seemed ever to have been tottering on the verge of an abyss, into which his failures or fortunes might pre- cipitate him.

Diffident, of extreme sensitiveness and sensibility, he con- tinued from his entrance into school to the end of his career a solitary in crowds, or, at all events, a stranger to all but a chosen few. Pride may have contributed to this shyness, for although the son of a medical practitioner, and consequently in a respectable rank as society was then constituted, be cherished longings after a more distinguished descent, and claimed or imagined that he might have shared ‘ all the blood of all the Howards,’ or, at least, might have boasted of heraldic blazon of some good old English stock. This appears to be a com- mon and is a natural infirmity of the transatlantic mind, whether noble or ignoble. Precocious at school, and the dux of every class, he preferred familiarity with his father’s library to the slow and dull drudgery of rudimentary studies. His devotion to books became a passion, the disposal of his precious companions was to him of greater importance than that of his other goods and chattels, and more of a biblophile than a biblomaniac he realised the fiction of a recent novel,” in which an old and perhaps crazy book-vendor endures want and misery, and risks pauperism, rather than part with his literary treasures. In several features Percival resembled Cowper.

fhere were the same timidity and retiring habits, the same ad- miration of beauty in external nature of the pure and simple in character among his neighbours, and the same marvellous fertility, the same abhorrence of fun, coarseness, and frivolity in production, and inferentially it is suspected the same consti- tutional tendency or puberty. But they were widely sepa- rated by the outpourings of inspiration, for while there is much that is genuinely didactic in Percival’s writings, they remind us more of the productions of Keats and Shelley than of the ” Task’’ or “TableTalk.” He was a poet at fourteen, and it is probable that he carried with him to Yale College not merely his dreamlife, but liis shy and secluded habits; for while it is mentioned that a tragedy was found among his exercises, it is added that he defended himself by satires against some form of persecution which has not been specified. It would appear that he obtained distinction in his curriculum in mathematics, oratory, and almost in every department of scholastic training, although still regarded and perhaps twitted as an odd girlish hermit. After the close of his public education and throughout life, his most marked traits were the enthusiastic pursuit of knowledge, especially in natural science, and his inexhaustible powers of laborious research. Whether we trace his career as a tutor; a physician; in succession a surgeon in the army and navy; botanist, andassuch superintendent of a public garden; geologist; contributor to literary periodicals; translator ; lexicographer; or in the various other pursuits or speculations in which he engaged and generally failed, we observe the same ardent spirit and unwearied perseverance. It is probable that in the intervals which separated his multifarious pursuits he fed upon his own consciousness or lived within himself, actually inhabiting however then, or when not engaged in field opera- tions, his library, which is described as large, dismal, and dusty, for which however he essayed to provide a more appropriate home by his testament. The aspect of this lugubrious dwell- ing betrays the poverty of the possessor, who, although ever engrossed in public schemes and undertakings, sometimes upon a gigantic scale and patronised by Government, seems always to have been ill or unrewarded, and often impecunious. As an illustration of his ideas of vastness, toil, and completeness, it may be mentioned that the Legislature of Connecticut, anxious to obtain a geological survey of the State rapidly executed, employed Percival, who proceeded somewhat in the following- manner :?” Those who have seen a Virginia fence can have a tolerably clear idea of his plan. For in the manner that such a fence traverses a field, he proposed to traverse the State; with this difference, however, that whereas a Virginia fence does not return and take the other angles, Percival’s plan did. In fact, beginning at a corner of the State, he was to trace over its entire expanse a double Virginia fence, of which the following array of x’s may convey some faint idea:?

An operation which, very naturally rendered him unpopular with landlords and cultivators. In the next place, his specimens of soil, strata, &c., would have filled a small museum. In the third place, his desire to secure fullness and accuracy seduced him into incessant enlargement of his report, so that he disappointed his employers after three prolonged respites. For ten long years this student remained silent, and, so far as publication went, unproductive, and it has been presumed that during this period he was saving money in order to repay a loan which had been contracted in order to prevent his library falling into the hands of the public auctioneer. There may be an anachronism as to the time or manner of his hoarding, but there is no error as to the nobleness or success of his efforts. During one of his long excursions, which extended to 6,000 miles, when exploring the lead mines of Wisconsin, he encountered native tribes, and is affirmed to have acquired a familiarity with their difficult and monosyllabic dialect. His predilection for the study of the structure of language, and his facility in becoming acquainted with various tongues, even to the extent of composing elegant verses in them, is otherwise manifested by his being entrusted with editing ” Webster’s Dictionary,” the “Latin Lexicon,” with the translation of Malte Brun, and by his acquisition, at a very early age, of German, when he produced an exposition of the languages of the globe, and by his ultimately becoming an adept in Sanskrit and Slavonic. It is piteous that this really learned man should at times have been insufficiently nourished ; that in 1832, perhaps a season of affluence, his income should not have exceeded ?65. It is equally lamentable that some of his rarest gifts and finest qualities should have been disfigured or obscured by indications of extravagance and peculiarity which cannot be distinguished from disease. Thus, his intense love of children became almost a laughable passion. His exquisite sense of melody, even of music, of which he knew not a note, but of which he had formed a large national collec- tion, or rather which he recorded by a liieroglyphical system of notation of his own, led to the following extraordinary exhibition: “To the surprise of all Percival offered to join our singing club, and even to sing, although he had not mingled in society for years.

At the appointed time he retired to a corner of the room; he had never looked half so weird-like; that noble Shakes- pearian head of his, the sharply cut, spiritual features, his eyes so full of the wild fire of genius, the then curling locks, all gave him the appearance of a minstrel come down from anothei age. We had already quieted the room for the expected^ song. Standing near him, I soon knew by the motion of his lips that he was singing. But no one heard him, for I myself could distinguish only the soft breathing of a melody of his that was familiar to me ” (page 42); and lastly he presented astounci- ing alternations of indomitable perseverance which enabled him to compose forty pages in three days, and of absorption in self, or inspired trance in which he lost all conception of time, and poured forth his verses uninfluenced by the passage of day and night, or by the number or nature of the stanzas which were flowing, or rather rushing from his pen. It would be irreverent to associate his religious opinions with such moods of mind, hut that they were of that vague and metaphysical cliaractei which might be expected from one so constituted shall^ be shown by the quotation of his own words,” Philosophy, religion, and poetry, sit enthroned as a spiritual trinity in the shiine o our highest nature. The perfect vision of all-embracing truth, the vital feeling of all-blessing good, and the living conception of all-gracing beauty, they form united the divinity of pure reason.’ None of his poems, even the most pretentious, such as ” Pormetheus,” ” The Suicide,” ” The Wreck,” nor his sweet lyrics, betray any trace of eroticism or ill-regulated fancy; even his posthumous poems, selected perhaps, by his executors, are free from all blemish. But all are pictorial, pensive, and thus reflect the temperament or moral tendencies ?f their author. Nor need this gloomy colouring be wondered at when his incessant disappointments, irregular and home- less mode of life and melancholy diathesis are considered ; nay, we might be justified in looking for a darker and more despairing hue of thought, when the veil which covered his inner life has been somewhat raised, and when it is discovered that this highly cultivated and gifted man was, throughout his whole life, a prey to ” deep brooding melancholy,” that he looked upon all around through a gloomy and distempered medium ; that his very activity was, perhaps, resorted to in order to exorcise the demon, to dissipate the shadows which were settling- down on his spirit. This despondency has been supposed to originate in an unfortunate attachment or rejected addresses: but he has contradicted this supposition, and has left the world under the impression that if he cherished a secret passion it was, as in the case of so many of those included in this series, for an ideal object, ” an undying one,” who continued to live in his heart, while it throbbed its last. Of feeble nervous frame, he is said to have died of general decay.*

Edgar Allan Poe, 1811. Moral Insanity.

E. A. Poe was the child of actors, who both died in his infancy, leaving him nothing except great personal attractions and a high-strung nervous system. The plague spot of eccentricity was developed in one of his proximate kin. A childless millionaire, attracted by the destitution, desertion, and perhaps the extreme beauty of the orphan, adopted and educated him; first for four years in England, where his character was that of an indolent, but clever, impulsive, irregular, and eccentric boy, blossoming, it is said, into a scholar; his next ordeal?for all his steps were downward?was in the University of Charlotte- ville, where he was the most distinguished of its alumni, but where his profligacy in intemperance, licentiousness, gambling, so far exceeded that of his debased companions that he was expelled for dissoluteness. Soured and enraged by the temporary stoppage of his supplies, lie emigrated to Europe, with the intention of rushing into the patriotic struggle of the Greeks ; but neither his courage nor his sympathy were ever put to the test, and after passing a year as a nomade, of whose wanderings or doings there is no trace or tradition, he re-appears as a drunken debauchee in a riot in St. Petersburg, is saved from punishment by the American Minister, who sends him home, The Poetical JJ orJcs of James Gates Vcrrival, with a Biographical Sketch. Boston : Ticknor and Fields, I860, where he is again protected and supported by his former bene- factor. Through Mr. Allan’s instrumentality he becomes a cadet in the Military Academy of West Point, where he was cashiered for neglect of duty and insubordination. Insult to the wife of his friend, which involved criminal ingratitude, was necessarily followed by exile from his former home.

Want and isolation developed abortive literary efforts; he then enlisted as a soldier ; is about to be raised from the ranks by the kind liberality of former school associates, but defeats their purpose, and invites more signal disgrace and ruin by vice, folly, and desertion. Again want developed in- tellectual or imaginative faculties, but on this second occasion more brilliantly and successfully as the gainer of a competi- tive prize for the best tale or poem, the award being couched in the ambiguous terms ” to the first of geniuses who had written legibly.” He is appointed editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, after having pandered his genius, sold his thought for a noggin of gin, and reduced himself to wretchedness ; while standing before the arbiter of this final throw for his future destiny, he is described as thin, pale, sickly, the traits per- haps of dissipation as much as starvation, in a seedy surtout, so buttoned as to conceal the absence of a shirt, and his boots so dilapidated as to reveal that he was stockingless. United in early life with a cousin, marriage, generally a corrective of errors congenial to youth, if these be not the fruits of it, afforded a temporary check to his extravagant indulgence, and paroxysms of long- continued drunkenness, but the neglect of his literary obliga- tions again despoiled him of employment. After a year’s disappearance from public, social, and respectable life he becomes again connected with the press, but the same excesses are repeated. He is described by a biographer as possessed by a drunken and unclean devil, actuated by the fury of a wild beast, as distinguishing neither friend nor foe, and the publica- tion of the magazine of which he is editor is suspended during one of these foul and frenzied outbursts. Professional fraud or treachery is the next ingredient entering into his corrupt course. He endeavours to start a rival periodical to supplant that which generosity had entrusted to him, and to secure the subscribers who had supported his patron. During several years there is a sickening alternation between labour and degradation, distempered fancy and unhealthy poetry. Even in the lulls between these tempests he might be seen skulking in the night along the streets of a great city with an expression of anguish and despair, howling curses or defiances, or breathing prayers and invoking the shades of departed friends and joys. But at a crisis when liis fame seemed to be established, when pure and 54 mad poets.

intellectual society was about to liail him as an honoured mem- ber, he reeled, a maudlin savage, from the elevation, and sorrow was added to his cup by the death of his gentle-liearted wife, whom he has the credit of having loved. ” None are all evil, &c.,” and his mother-in-law adhered to his interests and his fortunes in good report and bad report, canvassed for him, bore with the stupor which followed his orgies, and the maniacal rage which marked his resuscitation, and the ingratitude which darkened even his calmer moments. During what must be esteemed a lucid interval, he became connected with the well- known author N. P. Willis in the management of a daily newspaper, deported himself with propriety, proved an able and efficient collaborateur, and is described by his partial chief as of quiet, gentlemanly manners, of great refinement and delicacy in his bearing, and presenting the winning intellectual aspect of that genius which lurked behind wild passions and base propensities. Like all who belong to the same category, when known under favourable auspices he seemed to be formed of ?’ earth’s finer porcelain.” These attractions nearly effected an alliance with a fair and accomplished lady, but towards whom he acted with such deliberate and incomprehensible baseness as to be all but inexplicable and incredible. A visit to his native State, a fickle reformation, a vow of abstinence from stimulants, the renewal of a boyish attachment, afforded glimmerings of reason, but a casual encounter with former convivial friends and a single draught of the poisonous Lethe set all these amend- ments at nought, and a night of raving and riotous revel necessitates his removal to a hospital, where in a few hours this involuntary suicide graduated through a whole lifetime, comes to an abrupt end. Was this brutism of flagitiousness the mere husk, the mask, the reptile-cast skin of a noble nature ? Were his pensiveness and dejection, his best aspirations and his worst wickedness, a mere diluted Phlegethon of a corrupted genius,or may they be resolvable into the distinct parts of a moral drama, into sadness and badness and madness ? An apologist has advocated the theory that because he composed certain ex- quisite lyrical gems his original spirit was of ” purest ray serene.” This friendly critic, himself a convivialist, has affirmed that his ” exquisite taste was equal to a conscience, that he was pure, &c.;” but we demur, and would as readily concede that all who painted saints were saintly, that all who commemo- rated sages were wise. There is another solution. Either the fair and fragile infant was born a dipsomaniac, or the childish lips which ” lisped in numbers ” must at the same time have imbibed the stimulants which at once allay and create the appetite for further gratification, which at once excite and extinguish sensibility aud sentiment, which shake the very foundations of human rectitude and responsibility. This is not a tribunal before which the offenders against common sense, common prudence, common propriety can be summoned, or in which the degrees of guilt, the amount of punishment, the means of protection, can be argued; but directing attention to the bold epitome which has been sketched of the blurred, decrepid, bespotted course of a man of high promise and powers, we conceive that we may claim a medical verdict of the presence ot periodical derangement.

This outcast, the author of the ” Raven,” the u Valley of Weir,” &c., popularly familiar even in Europe, was of that excitable, unstable, ill-trained, but fascinating disposition which makes his congeners among ourselves, and can be readily conceived as palliating, excusing, even defending his errors to his own purblind moral vision. He would affirm that he suffered pain, agony, remorse, that he loathed the remedy, and that he sought not intoxication, but relief, oblivion. He would protest that he knew the consequences, that suffering, sickness, would follow the momentary delirium of hope and joy, but that his pressing sorrow was too deep for tears, tolerance, sympathy. He would argue that, burdened by care and by duties which he could not spontaneously execute, he is com- pelled to seek strength, inspiration, intelligence, as well as a solace, in artificial excitement. He would extol sobriety, glorify repentance and regeneration, pompously announce the objuration of all indulgence, eschew even the opportunities and temptations to indulge after a recent carousal; but his peni- tence, promises, pledges float away as the thistle-down, and his numbed, half-palsied hand insensibly crushes the stings of the thistle itself. If the visions and revelations of such lunatics be trustworthy, fear, conscience, care are for them unrealities ; memory carries them back to scenes and seasons of pleasure, youth, strength ; and the future is either a blank or the ill- defined and interminable vistas seen in a dream. Let it be supposed for a moment that such mental states are not fictitious, but become, when our veins run wine, actual factois of oui thoughts and acts, become permanent, morbid impulses; such ^ moral enigma as E. A. Poe may be understood not unless.

His poetry is arabesque, often grotesque, and suggests rather a shudder than a sentiment. It has been compared to the productions of the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the romantic, pre- Ritualistic, and saintly vicar of Morwenstow, but, we think, to the disparagement of the priest-author of” Pompeii ” (Newdegate Prize), ” Poetical First Buds,” ” Amora,” &c. &c. Henry Scott Riddell, 1798. Religious Melancholia.

Shepherds in mountainous countries are invested with a super- stitious picturesqueness suggested, it may be, by the solitudes in which they dwell, or by their supposed familiarity with won- derful natural phenomena and with supernatural beings, with the fays, fairies, wraiths, witches who haunt ” the untrodden ways,” or, still more likely, by their guardianship of what has become a type of innocence and religious feeling in all Christian lands ; which is denied to the husbandman, though of higher powers and pretensions of the plains. When the keeper of the flocks in a wild region became a consecrated shepherd in Israel, and was entrusted with the care and cure of souls, it may be conceived that the reverence and awe of those around were intensified. The object of this memoir took such a step, the connection between the one vocation and the other being- formed by the transition stage of dreaming and castle-building, in other words, of poetic inspiration on the hill-side. He was the descendant of a race of shepherds who fed their flocks in that pastoral and romantic region which inspired the genius of Leyden and which may be well named the land of Scott, who, in that weird ride from Branxholm to the grave of Michael Scott, has signalised almost the very spot, where Riddell spent his life:? Soon in his saddle sate he fast, And soon the steep descent he past, Soon crossed the sounding barbican, And soon the Teyiot side he ran. Eastward the wooded path he rode, Green hazels o’er his basnet nod; He passed the peel’of Goldilaird And crossed old Eartlewick’s roaring strand. * But this wild and wooded glen echoed in other days to the tramp of more formidable moss-troopers than William of Deloraine, bound upon a more fatal tryst than even his, for it is believed that at Teviot Head were executed the notorious border bandit Johnnie Armstrong with his seven sons, when the father Danced a spiny and sang a song Aneath the Gallow Tree.

They sleep under the green sward close to the village church, where our poet ministered for thirty-five years. Oil these hills, amid the burns and braes and birkenshaws by which they are beautified, Riddell spent his boyhood as a herd laddie, with so vivid a fancy and so retentive a memory that he gathered up from every one he met vast stores of legends, ballads, even modern songs. His acquisitions in these forms probably determined his adaptation of the lyric for almost all composi- tions. His early education was of the scantiest, and seems to have been confined to short periods spent in parochial schools during the winter months, prosecuted in defiance of snow, and storm, and swollen streams, and to the instructions of a person employed by his father to teach the whole family in the same studious season. His intelligence, however, speedily led to his promotion to the rank of shepherd-in-chief, and to his being- entrusted with a hirsel, or a large flock of cattle, which it was bis duty to conduct into remote and secluded pastures. In the lonely glens of Buccleuch his mind ” became more tinged with thoughts and feelings of a romantic cast,’’ and then visions and his fancies burst forth in verse. He assures us that at first the outpourings of his spirit were confined to his own bosom, that they served as an occupation of gratification alternating with the repeated perusal of such books as were accessible in such a wilderness, and with the construction of pieces of mechanism with the rude tools which he possessed, using his knee as his desk; he there recorded local events in rhyme, but bis hidden and hoarded talent was accidentally revealed by the wind blowing his bonnet, which formed his only portfolio, from bis head, and scattering its contents far and wide. His poems thus distributed became the prey of unworthy critics, although bis only ambition had been that they should be lauded and lilted by humble maidens of his own degree. His laborious upward course may be traced in his craving for knowledge, foi books, and when every other kind of literature was lacking, in his frequenting the cottages of those, even of old women, who bad possessed opportunities of reading and could recall the impressions they had received. He then attended a school in obscure town, where, besides miscellaneous information, he became acquainted with the classical languages. He now became an author, or the editor of a periodical so humble in its pretensions and circulation that its name is scarcely known, and that its readers must have been confined to a rural district. So humble was the position, and so narrow must have been the pecuniary resources of his relatives, that it is difficult to under- stand through whose aid or by what instrumentality he entered the University of Edinburgh ; but certain it is that he attended there during a complete literary philosophical course, that his success in all liis classes was considerable, that he obtained from a prosaic professor marked commendation for a translation of an Ode of Anacreon, that about the same time his ” Songs of the Ark ” appeared in Blackwood, and that Christopher North conferred upon him the grand distinction of introducing his song of ” In the Grlen all is still ” into the ” Noctes Ambro- sianse.” In estimating the financial position of Riddell I was fully acquainted with the penury and difficulties which, though they obstructed the theological career of students in Scotland some sixty years ago, may have served as a part of their training and as the basis of that laborious, sturdy, self-denying energy which made so many of them able defenders of the faith as well as philosophers; nor had I forgotten that Riddell had endea- voured to explain the means by which he gratified his thirst for knowledge and his ambition by confessing that he had hoarded every penny of his wages, and that to these savings was added a small sum left by his father ; but even this avowal reveals the hardships to which he must have been subjected. We next find him engaged in the higher branches of knowledge, at St. Andrews, subsequently as an extemporised schoolmaster, ulti- mately returning to his beloved haunts in Teviotdale. During all these changes he never ceased to engage in the composition of poetry, especially of songs, which, published and unpublished, must have amounted to many hundreds. The best known of these are “Scotland yet,” ” Our ain Folk,” ” I have Lo’ed Thee only,” but many others are still popular in the cottages and shielings of his native valley, while others have by a natural process of selection ascended into ladies’ bowers and festive halls. But his muse was not “cribbed and confined” to mere lyrics, but embraced ballads, epics, translations, diverging even into Christian political economy. Before settling at Caerlanrig he had passed successfully through the prescribed examinations and become a probationer of the Church of Scotland, which may be translated into a presbyter before consecration. It has been told that his reputation, passing beyond the secluded nook where he nestled, attracted the attention of the Duke of Buccleuch, who, seeing the appropriateness that a shepherd should deal with the spiritual wants of the pastoral population of the district, appointed him the clergyman of the chapel in an adjoining village. In the commencement of his incum- bency lie had to walk nine miles to the scene of his official duties, and it was frequently his lot to preach in a very un- comfortable condition, when indeed the wet would be pouring from his arms on the Bible before him, and oozing over his shoes when the foot was stirred oil the pulpit floor. But ulti- mately the Duke of Buccleucli provided him with a house near the station, where he afterwards resided. The tale is so sweet and poetical, and in such keeping- with the kindness and muni- ficence of the noble patron, that we hope it may be true, but its hero says nothing to this effect, but in his autobiography signifies that not long after his migration to Teviot Head ” the preacher who officiated in the preaching station died, and the peopleconnectedwitliit wished me to become his successor, which, after some difficulties on their part had been surmounted,Ibecame.’’ Here, surrounded by a simple-minded, attached, admiring congre- gation, he lived, loved, and died. A man of considerable intelli- gence, of great natural simplicity of character, of that culture which tancy, under the guidance of a systematic education, secures, he was enthusiastically attached to his home, his family, the scenery upon which his eye had rested since imagination was awakened; he was fond of society, and with congenial spirits in his own humble dwelling, as in the adjoining market town, bis conversation overflowed with mirth, music, ballads, and wild traditions. Occasionally he visited a kindred litterateur in the border towns, even in Edinburgh, but his time was almost wholly occupied between his professional studies, his poetic inspirations, the cultivation of his garden, the tending of a few sheep pastured on the adjoining slopes, or in wandering through the ” daisy dells,” the tangled woodland, or the burnside of his own Teviot. He was scarcely known to the external world, except on the appearance of a new song or volume, thus, ‘’world forgetting, by that world forgot.” It is highly probable that his solitary habits, the dreamy susceptibilities of his earlier years, the unvarying sameness of his vocations, the feeling that he had become the partner of a lady somewhat his superior in tone and habits, and lastly those excitements to which nervous natures are especially liable, impaired his mental strength and solidity, but certain it is that in 1841 lie became the victim of despondency so profound and so complicated with suicidal tendencies, that retirement to an asylum became absolutely necessary. The origin of his malady was, however, traced to the circulation of a report, calculated, it not to impair the usefulness of his ministrations, to wound his feelings at the most sensitive point. The injury inflicted pioduced at fiist great distress of mind, which may fairly be regaided as the natural result of such a crisis in a mind so constituted 5 but )vhat was at first merely anxiety and dejection, gradually passed into panic and perplexity, until the suggestions of his naturally emotional and imaginative disposition, escaping from the con- trol of reason, gradually assumed the form of substantive delu- sions or of delusive fears. Either as an effect of treatment, or the natural subsidence of his agitation, greater equanimity and self-possession were observed, greater confidence and reliance were extended to the superintendent, and the misconceptions by which he had been enslaved were either doubted or exer- cised less dominion over his imagination ; but although the phantom conspiracies, &c., by which lie had been haunted had faded in distinctness, the in controllable apprehension and anxiety remained in full force. He was terror-stricken, but could not identify nor describe the objects of his fear. He was designedly placed as a member of a group consisting of two clergymen, two litterateurs by profession, a medical man, and several other individuals of education and cultivated tastes, in the hope that the sympathies, similarity of pursuit and habits of thought, might engage his attention, and prove a source at once of distraction and consolation ; but at no period of his residence did he enter into intimate relations with his com- panions, or do more than tolerate the intercourse of genuine kindness, of which he was the object. This isolation proceeded rather from shyness, and a suspicion that his country bearing and local reputation scarcely entitled him to a defined position in such a community. To the medical superintendent he was as open and candid as his quiet and unobtrusive nature per- mitted. He served as a confessor for his sorrows and secret cogitations, and these revelations were sometimes of a most startling but interesting character. His principal theme was naturally the misery and suffering by which he was bowed down; but he likewise dwelt upon his inability to escape from these tyrannical feelings, upon the utter change which appeared to have taken place in not only his own family and social relations, but even in the external face of the world, and upon a suspicion either that his original identity had been subverted, or that a quality of consciousness had been established by the processes of disease. He spoke much of two parallel currents of thought which served to run constantly through his mind, one of these consisting of suggestions of despondency and despair, the other of bright imaginations, which shaped them- selves into couplets or verses of some description. He appeared to be convinced that many of these trains of ideas, especially the composition of poetry, originated outside or beyond him- self ; that neither the thoughts, nor their expression, nor the lhymes, were acts of volition, or could have been prevented or a tered had he so wished. He repeated specimens of these productions, and they were precisely of the same character as those which were afterwards recognised as his. They consisted of lyiics, border ballads, hymns, and excited wonder and admiration both by their beauty, sweetness, and by their origin in a mind so darkened and distressed, and amid such exquisite pain and terror. It is very probable that the atmosphere in which he lived?in other words, the conversations which he heard, the books and manuscripts and occupations of his associates?might have insensibly suggested recurrence to his former mental pursuits and sources of happiness, for at this time every effort was made to induce the patients to engage in literary work, and so successful was the attempt that now were produced many of those poems, essays, ” quips and cranks and wanton wiles,” which in after years appeared in the pages of the New Moo a, and were at that distant time regarded as marvellous illustrations of the possibility of eliciting light from darkness?

Darkness shows us worlds of light “We never saw by clay ; and of employing in Ja natural manner the healthy faculties of morbid minds.

Mr. Riddell contributed largely to its pages, and many of his poems can still be pointed out; but it would be rash to determine which of these had been composed during his residence in the asylum, although some of them undoubtedly were. One of these (November, 1844) beginning “The harp so loved awakes no more,” bears internal evidence of mental gloom, and may be claimed as belonging to this period, although it was sent to the editor long subsequently to Mr. Eiddell’s discharge. In addition .to the medical and protective means of treatment adopted, and in addition to daily and prolonged conferences and confidences which were resorted to in order to enable the patient to lay bare the whole extent of his per- plexity and distress, and to enable the physician to afford what- ever consolation or support could be derived from presenting truthful and healthy impressions to his mind, and from ex- posing indirectly the errors into which he had fallen, repeated attempts were made to rouse him from the state of stolidity ?r passivity into which he fell, after the disappearance^ of specific delusions, by reference to his family, former position, usefulness, by reading aloud portions of his own ^ published poetry and border minstrelsy, &c.. by inducing him to take exercise in the surrounding country, to join in appropriate amusements, and to stimulate the attention and poweis of mind generally by the infliction of slight degrees of pain, by means of application of blisters, &c. At one time a maiked approach to convalescence could be observed: he could be engaged in general conversation, and spoke clearly and con- secutively ; he appeared to have denuded himself of all delu- sions, and described his mind as prostrate before a sense of confusion and inexplicability, and a vague apprehension of coming evil. There is reason to believe that the original delu- sions never afterwards excited any influence over his mind, and that his look and expression of pain, difficulty, and dread pro- ceeded from his inability to comprehend the new position into which he had been thrown, and to struggle against the mis- fortunes which his consciousness of his impairment of power seemed to portend. His friends imagining that his removal to new scenes, and the consequent necessity for self-exertion and self-control, might call forth what faculties remained, he returned home. The restoration was not, however, complete. There are indeed grounds for believing that lie again sunk into profound melancholy, during- which, although living in silence and seclusion, and aj)art from his family, he felt constrained by the mastery of a spirit which seemed at variance to his own, or external to his consciousness, to engage in com- position, and actually produced numerous verses of various degrees of excellence, a metrical translation of the Psalms, &c. In a letter still existing, he describes the little closet in which he was accustomed to immure himself, surrounded knee-deep with MSS.; and where he conceived he was compelled to undergo a sort of penance or doom, and from which he could not escape. The friendship thus commenced with his physician?on his part in the struggle to obtain comfort and support, and on that of the physician in sympathy and in the sincere desire to afford relief?never ceased nor waned. After he had entirely regained his former health and serenity, he commenced a correspondence with his physician by a wish to obtain his opinion as to doubts which then disturbed him as to the propriety of resuming his ministerial, and especially his pulpit, duties. This was followed by placing at his disposal various unpublished poems, written, as it was understood, both while in the asylum, immediately after his return to Caerlanrig, and at other times, for insertion in the periodical which had commenced, and was conducted by patients, and which still continues.

The following ballad is supposed to have been written during the author’s residence in the asylum:? Though spring should flee lightly and summer come soon, AVe weary a wee for the braid autumn moon, Tor as she blinks bonnie o’er meadow and glen She sees her ain sel’ in the steel o’ our men, And to the auld tune o’ a Michaelmas moon In capers right cantie the steeds we bestride And boun to the foray on our Border side. It’s sweet ‘when the blackbird sings in the green shaw To cheer his proud mate in her new-bigget ha’ ; And sweet when the summer o’er mountain and lee Has spread a’ its blooms to the breeze and the bee; .But o’ a’ things aboon the braid autumn moon, Can heeze up our spirits in power and in pride When boun’ to the foray on our Border side. Our maids at the mirrors their lang tresses trim, And their een gie us light, though the stars should be dim ; But there’s naught on the earth, and there’s naught in the sky, The lack o’ the braid autumn moon can supply; But later or sooner comes back our ain moon, And then weel we ken wha the chargers will ride, And boun’ to the foray on our Border side. Bight proud is the king o’ his sceptre and crown, Begirt wi’ the goud and the diamonds aroun’, Yet feelings as proud the brave bosom will feel When donn’d is the sword and the helmet o’ steel, And wi’ the first roon o’ a Michaelmas moon, We swing to the saddle whate’er may betide, And boun’ to the foray on our Border side. The dewdrops may freeze into rime on the lee, Where glinted the gowans sae gay in their glee : But if our ain moonbeams gleam over them there, The rime shall bo welcome as rubies are rare ; And then the horse shoon shall be bright in the moon : When basking at hame they nae langer shall bide, But boun’ to the foray on our Border side. The courtier may frisk in the light o’ the lamp, While the Borderer sweeps o’er the sward and the swamp; But he ne’er can be hail’d wi’ sick glee by his dame, As when our braw lads o’ the Border come hame; When to the auld tune o’ a Michaelmas moon, The spoil o’ the proud and subdued we divide To dowrie the daughters o’ our Border side. The maidens are merry, and matrons are free, The sang has its sweet, and the tass has its glee, And the hut and the ha’, and the hill and the glen, A charm that the city and sea dinna ken; And spurtle and spoon keep our bauld hearts aboon, When bein by the ingle frae winter we hide, And bask in the bounty o’ our Border side. Mr. Riddell, from conscientious scruples, never resumed his clerical duties, even after his mental darkness had entirely passed away.

(The above passages have been extracted from the memoir of S. Riddell, by James Brydon, M.D., Hawick, 1871, with the permission of the editor, to which they were contributed by the Writer of this article, and have been introduced here as afford- lng an approximation to what is generally inaccessible, a psychological picture of an imaginative mind when under palpable or certificated insanity.) Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712. Genius?Moral Insanity.

There are two events in tlie history of Jean Jacques Rousseau which, to those who do not accept eccentricity as the germ or gauge of genius, appear ludicrous and lackadaisical. He is re- presented when a boy of seven as constantly associated with his father?a conceited literary watchmaker of Geneva?engaged in reading sentimental novels, probably of the French school, and when the store of these was exhausted as having recourse to historical and biographical works, which had been transmitted from clerical ancestors, who had fled in revolt from persecutions in the adjoining country. Plutarch’s Lives were to thenvas romances. That this initiatory education, and especially the influence or rather the contamination of .his reserved, sensitive, punctilious parent, produced upon a boy of inferior, sickly, and disordered constitution its natural effects, is proved by the fact that these recluses fostered their grief for the deceased mother of the family, engaged in paroxysms of weeping, and converted what might have been a natural into a morbid or maudlin sorrow. The second event adverted to occurred towards the close of his career. It appears that when living in Paris he occupied his time as follows: In imitation of what he believed to be the simplicity of a philosopher, he rose at five a.m., copied music ‘till seven, during breakfast arranged plants previously collected, again copied music for several hours, dined, visited a coffee house, and then wandered into the country to botanise, apparelled in a fashion which must have astounded the Parisians even of those daysi He wore a long upper coat somewhat like the modern Ulster, necessitated b}T the existence ot some disease; in the very hottest weather he carried his hat under his arm, in order to court, for health’s sake, the direct action of the sun upon his head ; he returned home laden with the spoils of the field, and retired to bed almost at sundown. But we must trace the upward growth of the regenerator of mankind. With a deadened sense of objective relations, which, when unimpaired, is the key-stone ot sanity, but with the redeeming traits that he clung tenaciously to his home, to his attachment to those who had once inhabited it even to their sayings and songs, this ugly, puny, prematurely self-conscious urchin is sent to school. There he manifests some generosity to his companions, but is generally pugnacious, addicted to vicious and sensual habits, and is upon the whole a clever, contumacious, disreputable, and indifferent scholar. What is rather a rare attribute of boyhood he cherished, revenge and retaliation. After prolonged family councils as to whether he should be a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a clergyman, and after his inclinations had led him alternately to seek for fame and fortune in oratory, drama, or in the pomp and pageantry of glorious war, he is apprenticed to an attorney, from whose employment he is discharged for stupidity and incompetency. He next appears under the tuition of a coarse and tyrannical engraver, whose locks he picked, whose property he stole, and from whose business he ran away. His must have been a nomadic family, as his elder brother had long before eloped and been irretrievably lost in the Far West, and his father, insulted by some local notable, left Geneva in anger and disgust.

As if to illustrate the real results of his celebrated hy- potheses that there are no natural virtues or tendencies to virtue, that onr prevailing principles and practice are the artificial products of civilisation, it would appear, from the evidence of a somewhat favourable commentator, that his con- nection with his master of the Burin developed the following crop of repulsive qualities : ” slyness, greediness, slovenliness, untruthfulness, dishonesty, rascality, and the whole ragged regiment of the more squalid vices.” In after life these different forms of baseness were recollected, but not repented of. ?sow an exile from his native city, he wandered through the adjoining country, admiring the beauties, partaking of the frugal fare of the peasants, inhabiting the picturesque hovels 011 the shores of Lake Leman ; then sojourned with a priest, to whom lie simulates contrition, whose wine and good cheer may have contributed to these religious impressions ; next he estab- lishes himself in the household of Madame de Warens, who is described as frail and generous, who either seduces or is seduce % her ‘protege. He is next found in Zurin, where he, a stein Calvinist, professes Catholicism, is admitted into a monastery, enters upon his novitiate, and after a dexterous controversy with the monks is baptized. But asceticism did not suit the constitution of this lascivious voluptuary, and he is dismissed, 01 dismisses himself, in possession of twenty francs. ^ as all this sham, or self-deception, or delusion ? A wanderei, liung upon one sou per day, and starving in his visions, repeatedly a lacquey, in one situation endeavouring to criminate a poor girl with a theft which he himself had committed, m another attempting to make love to his master’s daughter. At this ePoch. his musical, sensuous, and sensual proclivities become epportunely developed or intensified, and he returns to his former paramour, Madame de Warens. These propensities mus have induced a state of positive eroto-mania, and lie lived in relations with syrens, sylphs, and imaginary beings, the creations of his own fancy, wherever he went. Like others affected with this form of mental disease, he preferred intercourse with the phantoms he conjured up to that with real personages, a prefer- ence strengthened doubtless by the obstacles presented in his diseased loathsomeness to have passages with his fellow-creatures. Among his imaginings were two females differing in aspects and attractions, with both of whom he appears to have been enamoured, and with whom he held colloquies. For a long period it is quite obvious he lived in an ideal world, endowing every object therein with beauty and splendour, and incapable of discovering anything fair or pleasure-giving in his actual surroundings. It is worthy of note that this man at other times indulged in day-dreams of his marriage with royal dames, of his attainment of rank, riches, celebrity, and that, when penniless and a dependant, he could not write his romances except on the very finest gilt-edged paper, nor dry the ink with any powder except azure or sparkling silver, nor tie up the packets except with delicate blue riband. His connection with a family so characterised by degrading dissoluteness, and such apparent unconsciousness of the real nature of their conduct, discloses a new symptom in the pathological condition of this un- healthy adventurer, for he affirms that on approaching the mem- bers of this morbid group or objects of fascination, ” his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved in convulsions, palpitations, trembling, fainting.” Admitting that this is partly hyperbolical, partly hypochondriacal, the victim must have resembled the bird under the fabulous gaze of the snake. Repeatedly we hear of a life of vagabondage which led him into many of the countries in the south of Europe, which was diversified by a number of occupations varying from that of a domestic drudge to a connection with a diplomatist. With his protectress Madame de Warens he appears to have lived for ten years, and with other patrons, whom if he did not regard with lust he treated with ingratitude, for different periods. Apparently in virtue of introductions from Madame de Warens, he secures a connec- tion with the French envoy to Venice when in Lyons, whom he accompanies to Italy, exercising in succession the capaci- ties of preceptor, musician, and private secretary. According to one account he comes into contact at a village inn, according to another in his lodging in Paris, with a certain Therese, vile, vulgar, ignorant, who, however, became his lifelong companion, and the mother of his children. During his whole course this incarnation of perverse originality, turpitude, treachery, had ardently and persistently cultivated letters, made himself acquainted, superficially perhaps, with history, philosophy, and mathematics, and had gained prizes tor dissertations on the influence of the arts and sciences, on morality, &c., and we are not therefore surprised to find that, under the influence of a lady of somewhat doubtful repute, but who to him proved a steadfast friend, he was made known to D Alembert, Diderot, and Condillac, who employed him to write articles for the Encyclopaedia. There flowed subsequently from his pen com- positions in music which proved failures, an opeia which was successful, lectures on music, “Julie, ou la NouvelleHeloise,” the “Contrat Social,” ” Emile,” ” Letters on the Writings of Montaigne,” “Discourse upon the Origin of Inequality among Men,” &c. These works are characterised by brilliantimagination, by new theories of education, society, political oiganisation, but are all paradoxical, extravagant, and subversive of the con- victions of wise and prudent and pure men. It must not be conceived that during these prolific labours the student became more rational and respectable, or less restless. He is the guest, or tutor, in chateaux, where his amorous predilections are re-awakened: he rouses the prejudices or passions of a district, and escapes or returns into an island, where he assumes the American costume; he becomes the pet or friend of our aristo- cratic sceptic Joseph Hume, with whom he quarrels, and whose bounties he rejects either because the philosopliei declined to sit at table with the poor scullion Therese, or because his supposed criticism was alleged to be unfair or ungenerous.

Contemporaneously with these events, we hear of lemorse, retributive acts, despondency, and suicide. Whether his death was self-inflicted or not cannot be ascertained ; but it is probable that the decay of nature or disease closed his career, as illness or infirmity is said to have led to his retreat to the country domain of an affluent protector, where he inhabited a cottage, herbarised as long as strength permitted, and then lan mg his benefactors, asking forgiveness from his wife anc 10m o , and while gazing wistfully on the fair face of that nature he loved so much, liis troubled spirit passed into rest and silence. It might be difficult to determine whether this mnovatoi, this pretended discoverer of new worlds of thought, was mos mad as a profligate or a philosopher. His Confessions, whic 1 did not appear till years after his death, and which constitute the basis of all his fame or infamy m this pait of Emope, affoid ample testimony of mental unsoundness, and especially of that moral obliquity which impels an individual to regard as right ^1 that others regard as wrong in both phases It is probable that these glimpses of his inner life may have been coloured by that habitual, it may be said that constitutional, untruthfulness interwoven with almost all his acts; poitions o em ‘ , have been intended as poetical romances, and are admirable; but while they disclose an ill-balanced, perverted, and morbid mind, it is in his general history, even in the epitome given here, when viewed constructively, that the real origin of his otherwise inexplicable conduct may be traced. It is unnecessary to insist upon the gloom and depression to which he was subject, his separation and isolation from his fellow men, to whom he seems to have attached himself solely for selfish or sensual purposes, nor to the self-destruction of which he was accused, in order to establish this fact, for his biographers admit, nay some of them obtrude as a sensational feature, his attacks of eroto-mania, which not merely set all the law and limits of propriety at defiance, but created wild and multitudinous delusions, typical alike of his brutal natural propensities, and of the phase of alienation which these had perhaps engendered. But exaggerated notions have been recorded when he was not under such impulses ; thus he suspected that the plaudits awarded to his opera were intended to expose and enhance his offence as a plagiarist. Again, when about to leave England, he attributed the adverse wind to the designs of M. Choiseul to detain him in England, and like- wise thereupon he addressed the English bumpkins in a long harangue in French. Another manifestation of his mental degeneration was the conspicuous, the total absence ot the perception of truth, rectitude, honesty, in short of the sense of right and wrong, which pervaded not merely his familiar intercourse with society but his highest mental efforts. It may be that many of his wild and grotesque theories were proposed and elaborately marked out in support, in justification, of his own delirium and delinquencies. It may even be that his whole being was, from disease, a deceit, an hypocrisy, that his excited fancy and unholy convictions caused him to look upon all men, all things, all feelings, all opinions, all creeds, all conventionalities, through a distorted and false medium, and that he thought and acted accordingly. But in either case derangement must have been present. Yet this lunatic was one of the motors, one of the factors of the French Revolution, one of the unseen agencies of that volcano which, although at present silent, has covered the fair soil of France with irreclaim- able lava and blood. Nay more, he has been classed with St. Paul, Hildebrand,and Luther, who saved the society of Western Europe from dissolution, culminating in .the Reformation; as having with Voltaire and Diderot regenerated France, creating a new Bethlehem, from which might issue another social and political birth. It is not because this callous idealist sent his cliildien to the workhouse to be educated that I hold him to be morally mad, but because he lacked that natural affection, that instinctive love of offspring, which would have compelled him, nay coerced him, to shelter and cherish these unfortunate out- casts in his home and in his heart of hearts. It is not because he arrogated to man an original equality in faculties, and feelings, as well as political rights?that all mental qualities and acquisi- tions are the product of teaching and training, or that he extolled the primitive man, who in our woods a noble savage ran, as the perfect man, the model which should be imitated, and towards the realization of which all efforts should be directed?that I hold him to be morally mad, but because he would have reduced society to its primaeval disorganisation in order to attain this end, and positively preferred the foul, brutal, sanguinary wild man of the woods to the finest examples of virtue and ability with which he occasionally associated ; and because be practically emulated the passions, the falsehood, and the reck- lessness of these specimens of fully-developed human natuie. It is not because of his monstrous criminality and uncon- scientiousness alone that I hold him to be morally mad, but because lie failed and appears to have been incompetent to perceive, or regret, or repair the nature or the consequences of his own misdoings. He seems to have been somewhat con- scious of the imperfection or hebetude of his conscience, as, according to Mad. D’Epinay, when she endeavoured to console him when labouring under remorse, by attributing his enois to the head rather titan to the heart, he said,” Know that 1 was born, and am, of a perverse nature, that it gives me pain to do good, and that I hate my benefactors.” *

Richard Savage, 1698. Moral Insanity.

It is inexplicable that the cold, immaculate Sam Johnson ^hould have condescended to become the defendei o us intellectual Arab. A governor of Canada allowed a wolf to nestle in his bosom; a lord chancellor named, nursed, cherished two leeches; and the great lexicographer must needs have like Pets. Alternately he is the panegyrist of his verses, the apologist of his follies; he expends the most turgid phrases and equipoised antitheses; he runs into paradox in the vain attempt to show that, although vicious in conduct, Savage was virtuous, ari(l a friend to virtue, in his writings; and he expends his * Morlc/s Life of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Dublin Review, Octolcr 1870; Westminster Review, Octobcr 1859; Imperial Biographical Dictionary. grandiloquent epithets, and it is to be confessed ethical plati- tudes, over an expanse of a hundred pages in his ” Lives of the Poets,” double the space allowed to Milton, and triple or quad- ruple that which is niggardly meted out to Cowley, Collins, Young. The narrative is sad and unsavoury, unsweetened by the dignity and heroism of tragedy, unrelieved by the humour and heartiness of comedy; the issue is factitious, being the downward career of a grovelling genius ; the incidents vulgar? but it contains elements more striking than the most extravagant and romantic fiction. The Nemesis embodies the implacable hatred of a mother towards the fruit of her immorality; the misfortunes, the meanness, the misapplied talents, the degrada- tion of her victim; and the struggle between shame and sin, between fervid imagination and as fervid passions, between the selfishness and the necessities of the infanticide and the par- ricide. The author of the ” Wanderer,” and a vast number of pieces deservedly less known as being fulsome petitions to the great and the powerful, even, at last, for a few pence; which in stateliness of march, command of language, especially of in- vective, in the discrimination and contrast of character, very much resemble the productions of his biographer, was, according to his mother’s confession, the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield by Earl Kivers, but, disgraceful though the narration may be, some doubt is cast upon her veracity, as her object evidently was to procure a divorce from her husband. In this she succeeded, with the additional publicity that the separation was effected by a bill introduced into the House of Peers, instead of the Ecclesiastical Courts. She imme- diately became the wife of Colonel Brett. That this monster- mother should have disliked and avoided the ever-obtruding memento of her guilt, even although it neither trenched upon or touched her rank, riches, troops of aristocratic friends, may be intelligible, but for years she pursued her prey with im- mitigable, unrelenting fury and cunning. Unnamed, disowned, she first consigned him to the charge of a poor woman, on con- dition that his origin and antecedents should be buried in oblivion and the castaway brought up as her own offspring. She next declared him to be dead, and thus succeeded in de- frauding him of a legacy of 1,000?. designed by his licentious father in reparation for the obloquy of his birth; thirdly, in order to blot out his name and presence, she entered into a con- spiracy to send him to the American plantations, which was, however, fortunately defeated, as such a fate was tantamount to slavery, as may be learned from the issue of the children’s crusade, and the disposal of other troublesome children in those days; interment of another kind is next tried, and he is appren- ticed to toil, penury, obscurity, and a shoemaker. Like other irrepressible weeds which seek light and upward growth, Savage, the etiolated abortion, having discovered his mother’s secret anf3 herself, picturesquely walked in front of her house, in order to catch a glimpse of his tyrant oppressor, and having entered the lobby was seized, accused of assault and intent to murder, and would have been tried for this imaginary offence, had it not been for the interposition of some one in power; and when condemned to death for a homicide which he actuall}7’ committed, his sleep- less antagonist attempted to step between him and the mercy of the Crown. She even thwarted his attempts to gain a miserable subsistence by his writings for the stage. Upon two occasions her shame and antipathy were turned to his advantage. Lord Tyrconnel, a relative, in order to prevent the impending ex- posure in a series of lampoons of his connection with the poet, took him into what really was gilded servitude; and on the publication of his poem of the ? Bastard,’ disgraceful in its intent as well as in its effect, his mother tacitly confessed its scathing truth, and expelled herself from the society of Bath. The training of this starveling was of the most meagre and in- digestible kind. He figures first as a pupil in a small grammar school at St. Alban’s, where precocious beings of the same tem- perament as he scribbled rhymes, and there he attained some distinction. In this position he seems to have been supported by a stranger. In the next stage his spasmodic studies are pursued during a nightly attendance at the theatres for years, are crowned by the usual imitation of the pieces he sees in an ” Author to Let,” &c., &c., and in his own debut as an actor, which was sadly unsuccessful; and liis ultimate education con- sisted in observing men and manners, in the society afforded by taverns, temporary patrons, and the substrata of the literary world, where his teachers, needy or bankrupt in purse though wealthy in wit, displayed much of their ingenuity in evading creditors, masquerading bailies in execution in the liveries of servants, and in writing squibs in taprooms, in order to dis- charge their reckoning?the fruits of his discrimination or dis- section being preserved on scraps of paper picked up on the streets or elsewhere, necessity thus, as it lias often done before, stimulating genius. So elementary, so superficial and shallow were his acquirements, that even his eulogist unwittingly con- fesses his surprise that a man of no education, no reading, should in his satires afford so many indications of classical acquire- ments, wise discernment, and dignified diction. His works are undoubtedly redolent of hollands and tobacco, and of the coarse, if not corrupted atmosphere which then prevailed in places of public entertainment; but they afford sufficient evidence of force of character, of astute penetration into the motives of those with whom he came into contact, and of a facility in diction, which if not musical is earnest and striking. His lines remind us of Dryden without his polish; in caustic invective, of Churchill without his scrupulousness; but in the skilled adula- tion of the powerful he exceeds these and all his compeers. Of the beautiful in external nature he had no conception, indeed he never appears to have journeyed beyond the sound of Bow bells, except when bribed to subject himself to an economical and probationary exclusion in Swansea he went half-way. He has left no trace of love or friendship in an exalted sense, and, while lavish of money which was not his own, or was given to save him from misery, or other purposes, there is no indication of his generosity except one. Meeting on the street a wretched woman who had perjured herself in order to convict him of murder, he divided with her his last guinea. Removing from our consideration for a time the redeeming properties of certain of his writings, and while attributing much of his degradation to the cruelty of those upon whom he had a claim, and the mistaken liberality of those upon whom he had none, and likewise to his own passions and gross appetites, it is impossible to re- concile conduct about to be detailed to any other source than Moral Insanity, to that ill-balanced intellect which fails to per- ceive the rights of society, the obligations imposed by decorum, friendship, self-respect, or the delicate, even the broad dis- tinctions of honour and honesty, nor in fact acknowledges any higher responsibility than what has been called ” gallows morality.”

Now to the proof. There may be some explanation or extenua- tion of the broil in a brothel, where he killed his antagonist, but there can be none for his pocketing the gold of his patrons, and then caricaturing them without any feeling of shame or disgrace?for begging, borrowing, or receiving the assistance of his associates for one purpose, and then appropriating the means thus obtained to another with no consciousness of dishonesty? for the acceptance of munificent supplies from charity and com- passion, which he squanders in prolonged dissipation and licen- tiousness, treating with animosity such as required the repay- ment of a loan, with utter obtuseness of the wrongdoing. This supposed perversion of his moral sentiments may also be seen in his lack of gratitude or common-sense in appreciating the home and hospitality afforded by Lord Tyrconnel, and in casting away that protection, the very means of livelihood which he could have no rational expectations to secure elsewhere; except from the vain and extravagant suggestions of imagination, which never failed in his utmost need to inspire new schemes although they rarely provided bread; in his total insensibility or indif- ference to the comforts, the privileges, the feelings of others; and in traducing and betraying contemporary authors?so speaks even Johnson?and in exposing what had been revealed in confidence; in his iniquitous and insane profusion while utterly destitute of resources, while he never had a settled residence for three months together, while subsisting at the tables of the affluent, or exchanging jests and attractive dis- course for food, wine, and wassail in obscure drinking-dens, where he ran the risk of being publicly cudgelled ; and in elect- ing nakedness, homelessness, passing the nights in the streets, in cellars, on bulk-heads, or with the vilest associates among the ashes of a glass-house, rather than sacrifice his orgies, engage in manly toil, or accept assistance according to the dictates of others; in his selfishness, self-conceit, meanness, which, led to the outrageous misapplication of funds supplied by benefactors whom he lampooned for the liquidation of debts fraudulently incurred, and to his taking refuge in a jail, where, though kindly treated, he was associated with criminals, where after a confine- ment of six months he was seized with languor, dejection, and fever, and died unable to recall some thought with which his niind had been burdened; and in actions unjustifiable and un- reasonable to all but himself, and so insensate and morbid that they must have owed their origin to that original lack or sub- sequent loss of conscientiousness, that imperfect if not extinct perception of right and wrong which constitutes a form of mental derangement.

Freidrich Schiller, 1759. Genius?Dipsomania.

The author of” The Robbers,” ” Don Carlos,” ” Fiesco,” ” His- tory of the Thirty Years’ War,” ” Wallenstein,” ” The Maid of Orleans,” the Shakespeare of Germany, was the son of a surgeon, who became an officer, a forest administrator in the service of the Duke of Wurtemburg. The poet was tall, slender, squaie about the shoulders, evidently shambling in gait, but gentle, stately, and impressive in presence. Of kindly affectionate nature, he was changeable, restless, susceptible, unworldly, imaginative, excitable, ambitious?

The craving for something afar, The desire of a moth for a star. We find him a boy seated on the extremity of a branch of a large tree in the forest, gazing at the lightning as it blazed from cloud to cloud during a thunderstorm, admiring its beauty, seeking to know what it was and whence it came, altogether ignorant of danger. We find that, a lifetime afterwards, ” as his bodily feelings were those of languor and exhaustion, he adopted in impatience of such mean impediments the pernicious expe- dient of stimulants, which yield a momentary strength, only to waste our remaining fund of it more speedily and surely … Often the neighbours used to hear him earnestly declaiming in the silence of the night; and whoever had an opportunity of watching him on such occasions, a thing very easy to be done from the heights lying opposite his little garden house on the other side of the dell, might see him now speaking aloud and walking swiftly to and fro in his chamber, then suddenly throw- ing himself down into his chair and writing, and drinking the while, and sometimes more than once, from the glass standing near him.”

Between these two distant periods we trace him as a docile, intelligent boy, undergoing culture, designed and disposed to enter the Church; secondly, compelled by his prince to give up this choice for soldiery and surgery ; thirdly, deserting his regi- ment, in which he was medical officer, and seeking emancipation from royal and regimental yoke by going to Mannheim to see and to superintend the representation of his play of “The Robbers,” the effect of which drama was said to have been to turn the heads of youths, and to turn them into amateur bandits and outcasts, which caused it to be interdicted in Grermany and denounced in Britain ; fourthly, restless or nomadic, he passes from Mannheim to Dresden, from Dresden to Weimar, from Weimar to Jena, from Jena, &c., forming friendships, however, at every footstep, and leaving the fragrance, or rather the radiance of elevated sentiments, unselfish purposes, and intense ideality wherever he went; fifthly, spending his whole time in composition of the most varied kind, but always within the domain of imagination or romantic history?in the conversation or correspondence of the most gifted spirits of his time?in attending, regulating, reforming the drama and its representa- tion ; sixthly, in forming many attachments, two of love which might have eventuated in marriage, before he actually married, and numberless friendships, none of which seem to have closed in estrangement or feud; seventhly, living more entirely in fancy, feeling, and transcendental thought than any other man. He says of himself: ” My mind is drawn different ways, I fall headlong out of my ideal world if a holed stocking remind me of the real world.” He, with other poets, lived in a self-created, ideal world. This is beautiful, or barren, or blasted, as fancy dictates. It is peopled with fair, fantastic, or hideous beings, in keeping with the creator’s temper, temperament, or digestion. It may be the arena of glorious or ignoble deeds, the stage on which are represented principles and moral promptings, which elevate men into gods; it mav be filled with the homes and hamlets of virtuous poverty, or with the palaces of luxury, hereditary distinction, pretentious ambition. Is all this in- spiration the gossamer or the frost-work of a transcendental, inventive faculty ? Are the visions of the seer supersensuous, involuntary, and impassioned ? Does the heart bound and beat, do the muscles thrill and burn with fervid heat, is the eye in a tine frenzy rolling, is the mind unconscious of its own genius, are the musical words oracular ? and is the speaker for a briet time a sibyl, a prophet, a pythoness? It would be vain- glorious to assert that any one save the inspired passed within the magic circle, or witnessed the evolution of such enchantments. It would be profane to attribute certain of the sublimities of Byron to gin and water, or the unexciting ethics and landscapes of Thomson to his preparatory dose of Epsom salts. But we suspect that the process of composition is more mechanical, more dependent upon surroundings, than what is romantically con- ceived. Were the mind of this class sustained in constant or frequent excitement and exultation, as their fond admirers and imitators imagine it to be, were the brain inflamed and urged, as it is supposed to be, during profound thinking or feeling, why do we not find the whole race or many of them the victims of General Paralysis.

As his faculties and his prospects expanded, discontent arose. His medical project, like many which he formed, never came to any issue. The primary disposition of his nature urged him to perpetual toil. Love made Schiller crazy, as it does all gods and men. During the whole of his life he seems to have laboured under consumption, aggravated by angina pectoris, under an attack of which he died, uttering as his last words, ” Calmer and calmer, many things are growing plain and clear to me.” * Christopher Smart, 1722. Melancholia.

It would be trite to say that the noblest thoughts lose during translation by dilution, by the total inability of the translator to identify himself with the thoughts, feelings, and fancies ot the original, even if he could thoroughly appreciate and under- stand them. But even when such obstacles are overcome, and when the copyist has followed his model with exact fidelity, it is impossible to determine whether the whole force or delicacy of his brush, his burin, or his brain has been put forth, whether a second impression is ever so fresh and sharp and bright as a first, and whether a translation or a copy be not invariably looked upon as inevitably and naturally inferior in merit to what is, or professes to be, the direct and original offspring of the author. It may be that Christopher Smart, having taken and claimed rank little higher than that of a translator, has been tacitly assigned his place among these valuable contributors to our knowledge of antique models; and that the depreciatory criti- cisms bestowed upon his English Horace may be justifiable, as his name is not to be found in the Golden Legend of this class of poets in Dr Hannay’s article on the subject in the ” Quarterly Review “; yet it must not be forgotten that he was thanked by Pope for his translation of the ” Ode to St. Cecilia,” and was insti- gated to perform a similar office for the Essay on Criticism ; that he was the friend of Grarrick and Sam Johnson, the latter of whom wrote an account of his literary career. As another proof of high gifts or attainments, it should be mentioned that he gained the Seatonian Prize, Cambridge, in five successive years, and that the subjects selected?the Eternity, the Immensity, the Omniscience, the Power, and the Goodness of the Supreme Being, would indicate an aspiring, if not a lofty genius. His history, although doubtless embracing much of the romance and the tragedy comprehended in each chapter of life, is simple, short, and leads by a natural descent to that dark depth into which so many kindred spirits have fallen.

Educated at a public school he distinguished himself by his classical acquirements in the University, became a Fellow of Pembroke Hall, but closed his connection with the institution by marrying; then arrived the necessity for removal to London, the taxing of his knowledge or imagination for bare support, and his failure in keeping stern poverty from his door. Throughout his whole course there had been a tendency to depression : mortification, disappointment, and debt aggravated this gloom into derangement, and his necessities placed him within the rules of King’s’Bench, his prison, asylum, and deathbed. The few materials accessible as to the acts and aspirations and surroundings of men of even transcendent powers and wide- spread reputation, whose minds have bent or broken under disease, have astonished and hampered me since the commence- ment of the present inquiry; but the occurrence of such gaps and barrenness is much more conspicuous and lamentable after the last blow has been struck, and a living grave has closed over one who may still for half a century thereafter exercise limited family and social influences over the actors in the world which lie lias left. It is true that memory may be a blank, that intel- ligence may be shattered and shorn, that every sentiment may be tottering to its fall; but to the mental pathologist such wreck and dilapidation may be fraught with knowledge, and the study of the ruins of a Buckland or a Lucretius is as much cal- culated to inspire awe and solemnity as those of the Coliseum or of Nineveh. Smart, in a mad-house, deprived of pen and paper, indented the following stanzas (” than which devotional poetry has nothing grander even in Milton,” ) upon the wainscot of his madhouse cell with a key:

SONG OF DAVID. He sang of God, the mighty Source Of all things, the stupendous Force On which all strength depends; From whose right arm, beneath whose eye All period, power, and enterprise Commences, reigns, and ends. The world, the clustering spheres He made, The glorious light, tho soothing shade, Dale, campaign, grove, and hill, The-multitudinous abyss, AVliere Secrecy remains in bliss, And “Wisdom hides her skill. ” Tell them I am,” Jehovah said To Moses ; whilst earth heard in dread, And smitten to the heart, And onco above, beneath, around, All Nature, without voice or sound, Eeplied, ” 0 Lord, Thou art! ” The necessities of this penniless poet may be contrasted with the practice now prevailing as marking the change, if not the advance, in medical opinion upon the subject. Fifty years ago writing materials were withheld from the insane upon the prin- ciple that the exertion of thinking, correspondence with friends, ^c., were exciting and detrimental; now composition in poetry, general literature, art, is encouraged wherever capacity or pre- vious culture offer a soil, as a means of moral treatment, ot stimulating recuperation or re-growtli. We have seen that Clare was encouraged to write poetry; ” many volumes of verses such as the “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” ” Songs of the Night,’ A:c., have been produced by incarcerated lunatics, and periodicals have for many years issued from the press of Institutions ior the Insane, which are mainly devoted to rhyme of various degrees of merit; of these we may cite the ” New Moon,” which lias appeared monthly in the Cricliton Institution for the last forty years, of which the 411th number is before me.

Jonathan Swift, 1(567. Genius, Eccentricity?Mania (Structural Disease of Brain). A tinge of romance mingles with the earlier scenes in the life of one of the most plain-speaking practical men and mi- sparing satirists of his age. The posthumous child of an English family of good descent, he was, for reasons which are not very obvious, surreptitiously stolen from his home, and for three years concealed by his nurse : mysterious circumstances which created suspicion, and, very absurdly, affiliated him as a child of Sir William Temple, the Minister. At fourteen he was entered as a student in Trinity College, Dublin ; was re- garded as morose and unpopular by his companions, as devoting himself to history and poetry, to the neglect and contempt of the regular routine of study and discipline, a rebellious course which entailed the inevitable punishment of a refusal of his degree, but was subsequently granted that ignominious concession which se- cures, although it cannot be said to entitle, the holder to orders. A misconception of the character of this qualification enabled him to enter and obtain his degree of M.A. from Oxford, and to reside there on the bounty of relatives and benefactors. Acting nominally as the tutor and librarian of his connection, Sir W. Temple, he for a long period cultivated and stored his intellect with that knowledge, philosophical and political, grave and gay, which was ultimately utilised in such varied fields of literature, and which gained for him a very wide, if not a uni- versal reputation for wisdom and wit. There, however, it is affirmed, he laid, by a surfeit in eating, the foundation of that taint to his nervous constitution, which ever afterwards poisoned and impaired his system, burdened him with infirmities, soured his temper, dried up his sympathies, and eventually entailed insanity and death. During a temporary convalescence attri- buted to his native air, the influence of distinguished friends, perhaps of royalty, certainly of vice-royalty, procured him the appointment of a prebendary, which he speedily felt to be an exile, and as speedily deserted, in order to return within the more genial atmosphere of rank, affluence, and refined society. Living long in expectation of his promotion to a canonry in Westminster, which had been undoubtedly promised by the king’, and finding that his patron had deceived him, or had regarded his services as having- been sufficiently remunerated, liis unstable, or rather his unconscientious, opinions assumed the petty though acrimonious revenge of condemning, caricaturing, and, it must be admitted, calumniating all king’s courtiers, and all who aspired to their confidence, or had benefited by their influence. His wrathful feelings were somewhat appeased when he received two rich endowments at the hands of the presiding Lords Lieu- tenant, and ultimately the deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It cannot of course be supposed that up to this well-advanced stage in the Dean’s progress, his sense of the ludicrous and the grotesque, his cravings for fun and frolic, could have been con- cealed, or have failed to blossom; but it was upon his induction into one of his rich livings that his characteristic burst forth, and he addressed the only one of his parishioners present as ” Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places,” &c. This layical parson might in those days have exposed himself to a charge of innovation and ritualism, as lie had just announced that prayers would be read every Wednesday and Friday. It is highly probable that his youth, jocund manner, and unclerical tendencies prevented his further elevation. It has likewise been conceived that, notwithstanding his acknowledged talents, his intimacy with those who shared those gifts or could appreciate them, the flexibility of his prin- ciples, and, above all, a change in his political creed and the par- tisans with whom he had been formerly associated, presented a more formidable and permanent barrier to preferment. His pene- tration into the motives of even the Ministers whom he joined, his recklessness as a pamphleteer, his subserviency or adaptation of his versatile powers to objects doubtful if not unworthy of his character, and his hard, haughty, overbearing manners, may have contributed to the doubt which he certainly felt, and to the intentional conversion of his deanery into a place of banish- ment. Still another obstacle has been adduced to his elevation to the bench. He was accused of being no Christian, and that at a time when orthodoxy was assuredly not in the ascendant; but it was an assertion to which his rashness, coarseness, and speculative tendencies lent much countenance. The assumption of his dignity was attended by great estrangement and coldness, by outbursts of positive violence and vindictiveness on the part of the Chapter ; but although these difficulties were gradually softened down, giving way before great astuteness, force of character, and gracious manners, there still remained another source of suspicion and unpopularity, that of immorality. The ” Stella ” of his verses is held by one set of controversialists to be his wife, by another his mistress. All that has been clearly ascertained of this extraordinary connection is, that she was the (laughter of tlie steward of liis early patron, Sir William Temple, who left her 1,000L; that she joined him in Dublin, but that they never occupied the same house, invariably met in the presence of a third person, that she was young, beautiful, and accomplished, and that subsequent to her death, her name was never mentioned by the survivor without expressions of sorrow.

A marriage between these persons is said to have been per- formed by the Bishop of Clogher. Lord Orrery has said of this curious story, “there are actions the true motives of which will never be known.” Another lady occupied a place in his affec- tions, or, at all events, figures in his poems under the name of Vanessa. Sir Walter Scott treats with scorn and incredulity all statements or insinuations that such connections were other than pure and platonic; but Dr Johnson seems to have entertained an opposite opinion. There is in the manners, aspect, and attentions of certain individuals, especially if of distinguished talents and position, so much of acceptableness or attractiveness to the female mind, that their looks, their intentions, even their words are misunderstood or misconstrued ; and this may have been the case with Swift, as it is asserted that even after he had confined himself to his house, the dean- ery was daily beset or besieged by crowds of ladies, admirers, who craved interviews, kind words, and, above all, scraps of poetry. Into these MSS. double meanings, and expressions of unchaste, if not positively erotic, meaning found their way. A certain allowance must be made in judging of such coarseness for the colloquial language of the day, and for the habitual unscrupulousness of the writer; but the appearance of these blemishes, and the bold, harsh, denunciatory style of the satirist have tempted certain critics to deny his title to the rank of a genuine poet. That his intellectual powers were of the highest order, that his style was clear, rich, racy, that his powers of invention were unrivalled and felicitous, is all admitted ; but the range, and especially the elevation of his fancy and imagination have been questioned, and even his claims to success in the field of fiction have been limited to what was intended as satire in the ” Voyage to Lilliput,” &c. It is assuredly a triumph of genius thatwhatwere written with a very different object and with different motives should be read a hundred years afterwards by our school-children as charming novels or fairy tales in a region hitherto untrodden. When in the full zenith of his powers, when actively engaged in the very literary calling in which he had become distinguished?in pamphleteering, which served 150 years ago the same purpose in political warfare, and espe- cially in writing up or reading down a party or a person, that newspaper leaders and public meetings now do?while in the very act of composing- a satire he was, according to our bio- grapher, seized with vertigo or unconsciousness, and never again resumed his pen for the same purpose. This is pathetic and striking, but there is other evidence to show that this petit vial had recurred, in conjunction with other nervous symptoms, for many years. He himself traced this significant indication of decay to the childish freak of gluttony in eating a hundred golden pippin apples.

It is not necessary to adopt this example of excess nor the vague report of hereditary tendency as connected with the development of nervous disease, nor is it certain, although the patient repeatedly refers to his potations in his letters, that he was addicted to drinking until he was actually insane, but to one form of excitement he seems throughout life to have been prone, and to have given way to such violent paroxysms of temper that they must have resembled Mania Transitoria. This gave rise to reports of assaults on brother clergymen, and undoubtedly provoked and promoted that degeneration which ended in com- plete dementia, which is supposed by one writer to have ex- tended over a period of fifty-five years. Such a termination was apprehended by the sufferer himself, and allusions to such a fate are found in his writings, and its shadow has been traced in the frequent fits of despondency to which he was subject. An enthusiastic admirer has contended that his oddities and eccentricities of manner cannot be attributed to nervous pecu- liarities, and that mental disease in its true sense was never present. I cannot, however, take so favourable a view of the progression of such symptoms as deafness, sleeplessness from slight causes, rheumatic and other attacks, and a tumour of the eye which involved maniacal excitement, pervigilium, increased giddiness and a tottering gait, prolonged periods of dejection, and of inability even to write, estrangement from friends, gradual loss of vision, forgetfulness of the names of particulai Mends, even of words, and ultimately total silence. Amelioia- tions and arrestments in the advance of his malady appeal to have taken place, for, notwithstanding his impaired memoiy, he gave dinner parties, and notwithstanding his infirmity in walking he took much exercise as a remedy, and is said to have walked nearly ten miles a day in his room almost to the close of life. While able to take short journeys with friends occurred the painful scene narrated by Dr Young, when, gazing long and pointing to the blighted and decayed branches of an elm-tree by the road, he said ” Like that I shall die at the top.” For years before his death ” his understanding was so much impaired and his memory so much failed that he was utterly incapable of conversation,” and ” his reason was wholly subverted, and became absolute lunacy;” and it matters little whether his closing hours were passed in the quiet, dreamless slumber of fatuity or in protracted convulsions, he evidently fell a victim to the disease which we have diagnosed.

Robert Tannaiiill, 1774.

Suicidal Melancholia.

Tannahill was a handloom silk-weaver in Paisley. He was thin, pale, swart, as might be expected from his earnings of 10s. Qd. a week. He worked in a dark damp shop, somewhat below the level of a narrow dingy street, where a dull yellow light found entrance through small uncleaned windows, and where an oil cruse hung from his loom often helped his vision. Here for twelve hours or more of every day his shuttle sped its weary course, moving however to the music of the poet’s words in the very act of composition, answering the voice of other shuttles speeding on a similar errand. Yet to him this dismal, dusty room was filled with the sights and sounds and the fresh smell of glens, and birken sliaws, and mountain sides, where the ” bonny blooming heather ” relieved the grey rock, the grey lichen, the grey leaden sky of his landscape. Here even the joyous seasons made their circuit, and the voices of spring speak in such picture-words as?

Lav’rocks fan the snaw-white clouds, Siller saughs wi’ downy buds, Adorn the banks sae briery, 0 ; Bound the sylvan fairy nooks, Feathery breckans fringe the rocks, ‘Neath the brae the burnie jouks? passing softly and sweetly into the ” lang simmer day ” when ” blaeberries ” grow and the wild mountain thyme form features of the scene?

Where the deer and the roe Lightly bounding together Sport the lang simmer day On the braes o’ Balquhither. But the rays of fancy brighter than the dim twilight from without lighted up this perfumed fairyland, and the forms of bright and beautiful beings, known only in the heaven and loved only in the heart of poets, glided through the wild flowers and under the clear blue sky amidst which he dreamed; but although these fair phantoms were many, his history shows that he knew of only one, and that a slighted and scorned attachment. Sombre and sordid although some of the surroundings were, it is probable that the illusions and imagery which gilded and gladdened and concealed their real repulsiveness formed the happiest scenes and portions of his brief and uneventful career. He evidently de- rived intense delight from the production of his verses, from the correspondence with unlettered and unknown congenial spirits, from convivial meetings with those who admired or felt with him, ever mourning over the excitement and excess to which such ” reunions” sometimes led; but the deepest and most in- exhaustible sources of his happiness consisted in listening to his own words when sung by the lips of others, and in the con- templation of external nature, especially in its woodland aspects, as presented in the Braes o’ Grleniffer, Stanley fehaw, and other sequestered spots near his own smoky town. Of one of these emotions he writes that the most grateful of his feelings of the proofs of his popularity was the having his musings interrupted, during a solitary walk, by the voice of a country girl, in an adjoining field, whom he overheard singing by herself We’ll meet beside the dusky glen On yon burnside.

His passionate admiration of the beauties of the outer world differed widely from that of his prototype and idol, Robert Burns, whom in many things he resembled. The taste of Tannahill was entranced by pictorial beauty, by the forms and colours of what he saw and loved; while the soul of Burns idealised, moralised, and discovered, and was drawn to a mean- a life, an embodiment of the Divine in every bud and flower that adorned his path. Like the Ayrshire poet, he enjoyed the privilege and the training of family and home, of a selt-conducted education, which, besides culture and refinement, imparted considerable mastery over language both in prose and verse, and created that sensitive and sentimental nature which Was at once a strength and a weakness. Burns maybe legai ded as tlie type of the peasant-poet, Tannahill as the type of the weaver-poet, but there have been shepherd-poets, blacksmith- poets, &c., in the favoured “land of the mountain and the flood, and in looking over the voluminous biographical notices of poets Ayho were natives of Scotland, our astonishment is excited by the iarge numbers who have belonged to the artisan or even servile class who were of some pretension, or who still enjoy a posthumous Popularity. The elevation of genius gave to Burns a sense of equality with all ranks and manners which rendered him accept- able alike to the polished and the powerful: but present in Tan- nahill in a much lesser degree?and of this he was perfectly conscious?this rare quality imparted a shyness and awkwardness and uncertainty of position when in the presence of those whom he regarded as his superiors, which, led him to recoil from every upward step and from the promptings of ambition, while it fostered so keen a craving for applause, and fame as to become a morbid and fatal gift. Perhaps the narrowness of the circle in which he moved increased this moral infirmity, for, except when unwittingly following in the steps of artisan guilds on the Continent he sought employment among his craft in Lancashire, he never left the place of his nativity, nor added to the humble friends and fellow-labourers in his own walk of life. Everyone has his great man, to whom he clings as a patron, whom he imitates as a model, or worships as a god ; but except for one day, Tannahill’s only shrine seems to have been that of a smith who set his songs to music. This great festival in his literary course consisted in a visit from James Hogg, the familiar friend of Scott, Campbell, McNeil, who actually made a pil- grimage from the sheepfolds of Ettrick to pay tribute to the obscure songster who had the good taste to cultivate simplicity and purity in all his compositions, and the modesty to rest con- tent with the acceptance of his minstrelsy by the village maidens of his northern land. This meeting of congenial spirits was prolonged during the night, and by the gloomy and distrustful bard accompanying the cheerful and self-confident shepherd far on his way to Glasgow. Their parting was prophetic, the fare well concealing perhaps a purpose as well as expressing a feeling on the part of Tannahill. He grasped his hand, and with tears in his eyes said ” Farewell! we shall never meet again ! Fare- well ! I shall never see you more.” Bodily disease may have contributed to this depression, for with the sturdy good sense of his father and the tenderness of his mother he inherited the constitutional taint of consumption of which many of his kindred had died. But the pensiveness which many poetasters feel and many more affect assumed in him the more positive forms of melancholy and suspicion. ” He evinced a proneness to imagine that his best friends were disposed to injure him, and a certain jealous fear of his claims to jealousy being impugned.” To lack ambition altogether is mental defect and pusillanimity, and Tannahill, although the least presumptive and obtrusive of authors, and although contented with his lowliness and obscurity, and even desiring its continuance, craved the applause of a wider world than his own: that his Doric minstrelsy might be chanted on other burnsides than his own and over a wider area than that comprised in Renfrew, Stirling, Ayr, and Dumfries, where his songs there were and still are popular. We accordingly find that he was a candidate for the admission of his lays to what was in his time regarded as a temple of fame, Thompson s “Select Melodies of Scotland.” He approaches the arbiter of his fate less as a claimant than as a suitor and suppliant by his pleadings, but what was subsequently recognised as the genuine merit of his poems availed nothing, and they weie placed amongst “Rejected Addresses.” It is said that Keats was ” ex- tinguished by an article,” and Tannahill’s want of success seems to have been the culminating point of his destiny. It must have been that his temperament and original constitution, his toil in an unhealthy atmosphere, his habitual despondency, en- couraged it may be by his imagination and the contracted range of his enjoyments, prepared the way for the final catastiophe, but the “fiat” of the publisher was the grand disappointment of his life, relieved and counterbalanced though it was by the wide circulation of an edition of his book. But unsolaced and un- supported by the countenance and kindness of friends and ad- mirers, he manifested such unequivocal signs of alienation, and so keen a sense of the misery he was enduring, that he was con- fided to his relatives as labouring under unsoundness of mind. His return home was cheered by a gleam of tranquillity, or by the assumption of a calm which he did not feel, and stealing out during the night unperceived, he was next found stark and stiff in a pool?he would have written ” linn *of one of thote burns which had doubtless often found a place in his affections and imaginings.

Torquato Tasso, 1544. Erotic Mania?Delusions.

Torquato Tasso has been drawn as a martyr rather than as a madman. He has been depicted as the victim of the petty yranny, the ancestral pride, even the literary envy of the oveieign to whose court he was attached as a sort of parasite 0 arged with the office and functions which in former times were consigned to bards or harpers, then to jesters and fools, to 1 n?W *aurea^es > and whose sister he had dared to laud, ?ve, even to kiss in the presence of his master. Suffering er such wrongs and jealous persecution, he is more con- emPtible than as the deluded and drivelling maniac, but the portrait is probably from the hand of a king-hater. These discrepant hypotheses are fully discussed in able articles in the ” Journal of Mental Science,” the author of which is inclined to exonerate the sovereign, and to regard his protege as of unsound mind throughout his whole life. Whatever the origin of this shadow in the varied, virtuous, and glorious career of ‘ Jeru- salem Delivered,’ all his biographers agree that his infancy was passed under the influences of the soft, genial skies of the orange and myrtle groves, and the emerald sea of Tarento. He was cradled at the side of a pious, pensive mother, articulated when he was six months, and spoke when he was ten months old, understood Latin at six years, and Greek at ten years old; but though the precocious child borrowed much, most of what was bright and beautiful in his own nature, from these first impressions, his father was an ambitious political partisan of princely houses, whose misfortunes and machinations estranged him much from his home, and from bestowing such training and tutelage upon his son as his own education and experience might have afforded, and whose example engrafted, or at least fostered, those restless habits, that craving for the society, the smiles, and the more substantial gifts of great and royal personages, which afterwards characterised him, but which, it must be confessed, was the heritage and ignominious vocation of proud, penniless men in the middle ages. The spirit of persecution under the chronic internecine feelings, if not the feuds, of convulsed Italy involved children as well as their parents; the family of Tasso is broken up, the child is sent to his refugee father at home, where he grew in mental stature, perhaps the spoiled pet of the patrician, the polished, the pious, the refined in the centre of the Christian world?perhaps having his fancy trained and tinctured by the paintings, the statuary, perhaps by the historic ruins, even by the very stones by which he was surrounded, but where his practical, if not prosaic father, determined that he should study law. He is first sent to Bergamo, and thence to Padua, where, in place of dying or deadening his imagination over the Pandects, or submitting to the ordinary curriculum, he gave full scope to his perception and craving of the beautiful in nature, art, history, romance?he delivers lectures on heroic poetry, conceives the idea or outline of his great epic, and apparently devotes his whole intellectual power to anaesthetics. A pasquinade imputed to his pen necessitated a voluntary exile from Bologna, and for years he may be traced through Mantua, Modena, Padua, every footstep marking some advance in the path of literary dis- tinction and towards poetic fame, although those roses and laurels and imaginary crowns did not deceive his father or make him swerve from his prediction of poverty, dependence, and anxiety. Summoned to Ferrara by the Cardinal d’Este to fill some courtly office, his course as a hanger-on, an enthusiast, and a lover began, although to his own convictions the future was crowded with glorious visions of the pomp and pageantry of dis- tinction and success. It is probable that if his admiration and adoration of the fair sister of his nominal patron was any thing- more serious and sincere than the espousal of a name and a colour in Chivalry as an incentive to courage, or than the Platonic devotion expressed by troubadours to the heroines of their verses, it was but an episode in the grand purposes of his heart and soul. While this friendship, we dare not vulgarise it as a flirtation, merely gave immortality to its object in com- positions which placed their author at the head of the living- poets of Italy, while his orations secured the ardent and unani- mous applause of his fellow-citizens, while he confers repute on an embassy to Paris, to which as an humble subordinate with a threadbare coat he was attached, by saving a brother-poet con- demned to death, his liberal but capricious sovereign delighted to honour and enrich him. It is possible that golden opinions, increased emoluments, the acclaim of all entitled to confer praise, and the gentle condescension and confidence of the object of his admiration, who granted private conferences, who listened approvingly, and, as the theme of such poetry and such a poet, delightedly, may have proved formidable, even fatal, to an excitable, dreamy, yet aspiring nature, and have sown or stimulated the germ of that moral upas tree which in part and at times cast a shadow over his future happiness. At all events, these favours of fortune were the last rays of sunshine which for a season gladdened his career. Suspicion, espionage, accusations of heresy and conspiracy dogged his steps, and although for a brief time protected by his idol, Leonora, after a struggle with the desperadoes who carried out the designs of aristocratic intriguers, be was consigned to the cell of a monastery, threatened, cajoled, watched, worried, with the design of producing that madness which had been attributed to him. Liberated or escaping from thraldom, lie flies in disguise to his early home ; tempted fiom thence it is affirmed by letters from the faithful Leonoia, he returns to Ferrara, but is there, and subsequently in Mantua and Venice, pursued and ostracised by the stigma of insanity. ^ andering as a wretched, ragged beggar, selling the baubles which had been the gift of royalty in his palmy days, exposed to the various and bitter fortunes of outcasts, his devious, it may be delirious, steps were again attracted to the vicinity of his patroness, and of what was still more priceless and peerless, his MS. writings, and he is again rejected, reviled, and immured in an hospital with the wildest and most degraded captives, and in his frightful dungeon his mind is said to have been ” petrified,” in other words, was overthrown. Even the miseries of this chamber of horrors were aggravated by the death of Leonora, and by the publication of ” Jerusalem Delivered ” in a mutilated form; but even under these misfortunes he continued to pour forth in lavish luxuriance as profusely as the improviscitori of his native land the inspirations of his genius?and it is doubtful whether, when ameliorations were conceded, when he was per- mitted to associate with his friends, when his cell became a shrine, to which the pilgrims and devotees and worshippers of the divinity of genius resorted, even when he reascended the eminence from which he had been hurled, his lays and lyrics were more beautiful and exquisite. After five years’ seclusion, his failing health extorted not compassion, but a semblance of leniency from his gaolers, and he was allowed to gratify his religious feelings by visits to churches and convents, but was still watched and warded; at other times he gazed from the grated windows of his gloomy prisonhouse, where his pallid, calm, statuesque countenance was visible to the crowd in the street, and excited in such strangers that pity and sympathy for which he yearned, but which he was denied. The remonstrances and petitions of the princes and peoples of Italy at length obtained his discharge from confinement, under a sentence, however, of banishment and silence. In one sense his restoration to society came too late: he had to contend not merely with the demons of pride and poverty, but with a sense of deep, irreparable in- juries, of disappointed hopes, and visions of a wasted life, and with that placid but deep-seated melancholy which is akin to penitence. It may have been this depressing sentiment of pious gratitude which led him to our Lady of Loretto and other holy spots; but it does not appear to have been dissipated, either by reliance on heavenly .aid, by the admiration, adulation, munificence of the wise and wealthy, or by the lovely ancl health-restoring scenes amid which he moved?not even by the award of that laurel crown which he must have coveted; and he fell on sleep in the quiet monastery of Saint Onofrio, while the streets of Eome were animated by the preparation for his coronation in the capital, and the wreaths were fresh and green which were to have graced the ceremonial.

But there was another interpretation of the tracings on the pale face seen in the gloomy cell of St. Anne’s. Whether intel- ligence was crushed and clouded by persecution and captivity, or whether his exquisite organisation, his constant intercourse with those ” things unseen,” his own thoughts and emotions, the throes to which so keenly sensible and sensitive a nature is sub- ject in passing through even a happy and harmonious career, initiated a mental revolution or not, Torquato Tasso was un- doubtedly of unsound mind. He was troubled with strange apprehensions and nocturnal apparitions?lights which were seen shining or sparkling in the air; his ears were assailed by frightful noises, by hissing, tingling, ringing of bells, and the ticking ot a clock. Often in his sleep he was tormented with fantastic visions of distress and turmoil. Amidst so many torments there appeared to him in the air the image of the Virgin and Saviour, sphered in a circle of coloured vapours, which was accepted as a rainbow of hope, and as a miracle. It is interesting that Bene- venuto Cellini saw a vision of precisely similar aspect, in a similar cell and similar circumstances. Tasso is attacked by fever?the Virgin is appealed to; he recovers?and a vow of pil- grimage to Loretto testifies his gratitude as a devotee; a sonnet and a madrigal as a poet.

The phantasm was no longer the imp, the Poletto, which confined itself to stealing his papers and his money, but ” a celestial being, but palpable to sense, inspiring lofty and glorious imaginings, impassioned and transcendental eloquence, which visited him when restored to his beloved Naples, when sur- rounded by all the pleasures and refinements which wealth, friendship, and the profusion of princes could command, when calm and collected, in solitude, and in society. This apparition was no play of fancy ; to him it was a verity, a reality, in which he believed as firmly as in his own existence ; it was no spectre, no shadow of the past, conjured up by fear, or remorse, or excite- ment, for although he was excited while it was present, it was by the fervour of intellectual exercise, of a high and holy moral purpose. His companions were sceptics, but so entire and abso- lute was his faith that he offered, as he could not convince them by reason, to do so by experience, ” I shall cause the spirit in which you refuse to believe, to appear before your own eyes. ” I accepted the offer,” says his biographer, ” and next day, when we sat by the fire conversing, he turned his eyes towards the window, and looking with steadfast attention, appeared so completely absorbed that when I called to him he did not answer. c See,’ said he at length, ‘ see, my familiar spirit comes to converse with me.’ I looked with the greatest eai- nestness, but could see nothing enter the apartment. In the meantime, Tasso began to converse with this mysterious being. I saw and heard himself alone. Sometimes he questioned, and sometimes answered; and from his answers I gathered the sense of what he had heard.

” The subject of his discourse was so elevated, and the expres- sions so sublime, that I felt myself in a kind of ecstasy. I did not venture to interrupt him, or to trouble him with questions, and a considerable time elapsed before the spirit disappeared. I was informed of its departure by Tasso, who turning towards me said, ‘ In future you will cease to doubt.’ f Kather,’ said I, ‘ I shall be more sceptical; for although I have heard astonish- ing words, I have seen nothing.’ Smiling, he replied, ‘You have perhaps heard and seen more than ‘ he stopped short; and fearing to importune him by my questions, I dropped the conversation. And in this belief and communion he lived and died.”

But were these impressions which fell powerless on the senses of his companions in the vulgar sense delusions ? Did not Torquato Tasso see and hear the being to whom he responded ? were the words and the meaning his own, or were they not as real to his consciousness as the words and the meaning of the witness who offered a negative testimony as to their reality ? What proof, in short, is there that such apparitions are not as substantial in a logical sense as the convictions by which they are accompanied, the conditions of the nerves which are in some manner affected, or as the vibrations of that air and light upon which all knowledge both of an external and of a supernatural world depend ?

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