We select the following illustration :

A gentleman of considerable fortune in Oxfordshire, about thirtyfive years of age, sent for his solicitor to make his will. He was in habits of strict friendship with him, and stated that he wished to add five hundred pounds a year to his mother's jointure, if she got well, she being then (to the knowledge of the solicitor and himself only) confined as a lunatic; to make a provision for two natural children; to leave a few trifling legacies; and then, if he died childless, to make him, the solicitor, his heir. His friend expressed his gratitude, but added that he could not accept such a mark of his good opinion, until he was convinced that it was his deliberate judgment so to dispose of his property, and that decision communicated to him six months afterwards.

In about six weeks time the gentleman became deranged, and continued in such a state of excitement for a whole month, (during which he was visited constantly by Sir George Tuthill and myself,) as to require coercion every day. At the expiration of that time he was composed and comfortable. But his languor and weakness bore a proportion to his late excitement, and it was very doubtful whether he would live. On entering his room one day, to my question how he found himself, he answered,-" Very ill, Sir; about to die; and only anxious to make my will first." This could hardly be listened to under his circumstances, and he was persuaded to forego that wish for the present. The next day he made the same answer to the same question, but in such a tone and manner as to extort from common humanity, even at the probable expense of future litigation, an acquiescence in his wish to disburthen his mind. The solicitor was sent for, and, having been with him the preceding evening, met us, at our consultation in the morning, with a will prepared according to the instructions he had received before the attack of disease, as well as to those given the last night. He proposed to read this to the gentleman in our presence, and that we should witness the signature of it, if we were satisfied that it expressed clearly his intentions. It was read, and he answered, "yes," 66 yes," "yes," distinctly to every item, as it was deliberately proposed to him. On going down stairs with Sir George Tuthill and the solicitor, to consider what was to be done, I expressed some regret that we, the physicians, had been involved in an affair which could hardly be expected to terminate without an inquiry in a court of law, in which we must necessarily be called upon to justify ourselves for permitting this good gentleman, under such questionable circumstances, to make a will. It occurred to me then, to propose to my colleague to go up again into the sick room, to see whether our patient could re-word the matter, as a test, on Shakspeare's authority, of his soundness of mind. He repeated the clauses which contained the addition to his mother's jointure, and which made provision for the natural children, with sufficient correctness; but he stated that he had left a namesake, though not a relation, ten thousand pounds, whereas he had left him

five thousand pounds only; and there he paused. After which I thought it proper to ask him, to whom he had left his real property, when these legacies should have been discharged,-in whom did he intend that his estate should be vested after his death, if he died without children? "In the heir at law, to be sure," was the reply. Who is your heir at law? "I do not know." Thus he "gambolled from the matter, and laboured, according to this test, under his madness still.

'He died, intestate of course, four days afterwards. I owe it to the solicitor, the friend, to testify that his conduct throughout was strictly honourable; and I have pleasure in adding, that the heir at law has generously made good the bequest to the mother, and the provision for the natural children, to the extent of more than thirty thousand pounds.'-p. 60.

Sir Henry, whose acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature gives this volume many of its attractions, proceeds from Shakspeare to Horace.-' Twice,' he says, it has occurred to me to find his portraits of madness exemplified to the life.'

'One case, that of the gentleman of Argos, whose delusion led him to suppose that he was attending the representation of a play, as he sat in his bedchamber, is so exact, that I saw a person of exalted rank under those very circumstances of delusion, and heard him call upon Mr. Garrick to exert himself in the performance of Hamlet. The passage is the more curious as it specifies distinctly that it was upon this one point only that the gentleman was mad:

"Fuit haud ignobilis Argis,

Qui se credebat miros audire trag odos,
In vacuo lætus sessor plausorque theatro;
Cætera qui vitæ servaret munia recto

More; bonus sane vicinus, amabilis hospes," &c. Epist. lib. ii. 2. 128. 'In another well known case, which justified the Lord Chancellor's issuing a writ de lunatico inquirendo, the insanity of the gentleman manifested itself in his appropriating everything to himself, and parting with nothing. When strongly urged to put on a clean shirt, he would do it, but it must be over the dirty one; nor would he put off his shoes when he went to bed. He would agree to purchase anything that was to be sold, but he would not pay for it. He was, in fact, brought up from the King's Bench prison, where he had been committed for not paying for a picture valued at fifteen hundred pounds, which he had agreed to buy; and in giving my opinion to the jury, I recommended it to them to go over to his house, in Portlandplace, where they would find fifty thousand pounds worth of property of every description; this picture, musical instruments, clocks, babyhouses, and baubles, all huddled in confusion together, on the floor of his dining room. To such a case what could apply more closely than the passage

"Si quis emat citharas, emptas comportet in unum,
Nec studio citharæ, nec Musæ deditus ulli;

Si scalpra et formas, non sutor; nautica vela,
Aversus mercaturis: delirus et amens

Undique dicatur merito."-Sat. lib. ii. 3. 104.

'If the physician were to collect and apply the brief notices of various disorders, which have been thrown out by the great poets of antiquity, he might not only illustrate the truth of the descriptions drawn by those accurate observers of nature, but derive from them some useful hints to assist him in his own observation of disease.'p. 64.

To return to Hamlet,-his criterion of madness, however excellent as a mark for incoherence of intellect, will scarcely be used in detecting the more intricate forms of this Protean malady. The Prince's testimony in favour of his own perfect sanity is treated with as little ceremony by the commentators, as similar words from the lips of a staring lunatic would be by the phalanx of modern mad-doctors. Some of them, however, are of opinion that the poet means to describe a mind disordered, and that the feigned madness is a part of the plot quite compatible with such a state of intellect; while others see nothing but the assumption of insanity in the inconsistencies of Hamlet. This discrepancy springs from the different notions included by different men in their definitions of madness. In fact, however, madness, like sense, admits of no adequate definition; no one set of words will include all its grades and varieties. Some of the existent definitions of insanity would let loose half the inmates of Bedlam, while others are wide enough to place nine-tenths of the world in strait-jackets. The vulgar error consists in believing the powers of the mind to be destroyed by the malady; but general disturbance of the intellect is only one form. The aberration may be confined to a few objects or trains of ideas; sometimes the feelings, passions, and even instincts of our nature may assume an undue ascendency over a mind not disjointed, but warped, urging it with resistless force to the commission of forbidden deeds, and to form the most consistent plans for their accomplishment.

Thus, in cases of monomania, a mother is impelled to murder her children-conscious of the atrocity of the act-abhorring it, and even entreating those around her to protect her from herselfas in the instance related by Orfila, where the wretched woman, whenever she washed her children, and saw the water trickling from them, heard a voice whispering in her ear, Laissez le coulerlet it flow-until, after a thousand struggles to banish the horrid suggestion, she plunged the knife. Damien persisted to the last in declaring, that had he been bled that morning as he had

wished and requested to be, he never would have attempted the assassination of Louis XV. In another equally well attested instance, a father systematically persecuted his children for many years. During the whole of this period he was looked on by the generality as a man of great talent and probity; and it was only after the history of his life had been sifted by several of the best physicians of the day, that a tinge of insanity was perceived to pervade it. He had started with impracticable notions of virtue, and, finding these not realised in the conduct of his children, he conceived a hatred against them, which caused him to persecute his sons, even to destitution, and to accuse his daughters to their husbands of the worst of crimes. In the prosecution of his plans, and in the business of life, he evinced anything but incoherence.

Villemain, in his Mélanges Historiques,' says, 'Shakspeare has represented feigned as often as real madness; finally, he has contrived to blend both in the extraordinary character of Hamlet, and to join together the light of reason, the cunning of intentional error, and the involuntary disorder of the soul. Goethe, again, in his Wilhelm Meister, says:

'It is clear to me, that Shakspeare's intention was to exhibit the effects of a great action, imposed as a duty upon a mind too feeble for its accomplishment. In this sense, I find the character of Hamlet consistent throughout. Here is an oak planted in a vase, proper only to receive the most delicate flowers. The roots strike out, and the vessel flies to pieces. A pure, noble, highly moral disposition, but without that energy of soul that constitutes the hero, sinks under a load which it can neither support nor resolve to abandon altogether. All his obligations are sacred to him, but this alone is above his powers! An impossibility is required at his hands-not an impossibility in itself, but that which is so to him. Observe how he shifts, hesitates, advances, and recedes!-How he is continually reminded and reminding himself of his great commission, which he nevertheless, in the end, seems almost entirely to lose sight of, and this without ever recovering his former tranquillity.'

Ingenious and elegant as is this German gloss, we nevertheless think Villemain right in adhering to Malone's opinion. Hamlet, after his father's death, is a totally different being from the hope of Denmark whom Ophelia lauds with such impassioned eloquence, and whom Horatio and Fortinbras both deck with the noblest attributes of our nature. Neither indecision of character nor feigned madness account for Hamlet's actions. His conduct, when he leaps into Ophelia's grave, and the reason he assigns for it, are evidences of a mind diseased. The bravery of his grief put me into a towering passion,' is the poorest of excuses for disturbing, before the august assemblage, the last rites of one whom

he

he so loved, that forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity, make up his sum.' In short, we have no doubt, that Shakspeare intended to display in the character of Hamlet a species of mental malady, which is of daily occurrence in our own experience, and every variety of which we find accurately described by his contemporary, the author of the Anatomie of Melancholy.'

Suspicion and jealousy (says Burton) are general symptoms. If two talk together, discourse, whisper, jest, he thinks presently they mean him-de se putat omnia-or if they talk with him, he is ready to misconstrue every word they speak, and interpret it to the worst. Inconstant they are in all their actions; vertiginous, restless, unapt to resolve of any business; they will, and they will not, persuaded to and from, upon every occasion: yet, if once resolved, obstinate and hard to be reconciled. They do, and by and by repent them of what they have done; so that both ways they are disquieted of all hands, soon weary. They are of profound judgments in some things, excellent apprehensions, judicious, wise, and witty; for melancholy advanceth men's conceits more than any humour whatever. Fearful, suspicious of all, yet again many of them desperate hair-brains; rash, careless, fit to be assassinates, as being void of all ruth and sorrow. Tædium vitæ is a common symptom; they soon are tired with all things-sequitur nunc vivendi nunc moriendi cupido; often tempted to make away with themselves-vivere nolunt, mori nesciunt: they cannot die, they will not live; they complain, lament, weep, and think they lead a most melancholy life.'

It would be difficult to find a criticism more applicable to the character of Hamlet than in this page of old Burton, who drew the picture as much from himself as from observation made on others. This form of madness (the melancholia attonita of nosologists) begins with lowness of spirits, and a desire for solitude. The very words of Hamlet have been taken by Dr. Mason Good to describe the first stage of the malady.

I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth; foregone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fires, why, it appears no other thing to me than a pestilent congregation of vapours.

Thus the external world is either falsely recognised by the perception, or falsely discriminated by the judgment. The objects of former love become the objects of present indifference or dislike. If the temperament be timorous, everything is shunned or suspected; if fierce, a morose and mischievous disposition is engendered. If the unfortunate individuals labour under the scourge of religious terrors, they, like Cowper, almost invariably attempt suicide.