"Now could I prophesy,

But that the icy hand of death," &c.

Ev. Well, I will not controvert your creed, Astrophel; rather let me illustrate some of your apparent mysteries by simple analogy.

As in these extreme moments of life, so in the hour of extreme danger, when an awful fate is impending, and the world and our sacred friendships are about to be lost to us, a vision of our absent friends will pass before us with all the light of reality. We read in the writings of Dr. Conolly of a person who, in danger of being swamped on the Eddystone Rock, saw the phantoms of his family passing distinctly before him; and these are the words of the English Opium-eater: "I was once told by a near relative of mine, that, having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life in its minutest incidents arrayed before her simultaneously, as in a mirror, and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part."

Now, although the coming on of death is often attended by that slight delirium indicated by the babbling of green fields, and the playing with flowers, and the picking of the bedclothes, and the smiling on the fingers' ends, yet in others some oppressive or morbid cause of insanity may be removed by the moribund condition. In the words of Aretæus, "The system has thrown off many of its impurities, and the soul, left naked, was free to exercise such energies as it still possessed."

I will glance in illustration at these interesting cases from Zimmerman, of an insane woman of Zurich, who " a few hours before her death became perfectly sensible, and wonderfully elo

quent;" from Dr. Perceval, of a female idiot, who, as she was dying of consumption, evinced the highest powers of intellect; from Dr. Marshall, of the maniac who became completely rational some hours previous to his dissolution; and from Dr. Hancock, of the Quaker, who, from the condition of a drivelling idiot, became, shortly before his death, so completely rational as to call his family together, and, as his spirit was passing from him, bestow on them with pathetic solemnity his last benediction."

Thus your impressive records are clearly explained by pathology; and, perhaps, unconscious of this, Mrs. Opie has a fine illustration in her "Father and Daughter," the mind of the maniac parent being illumined before his death by a beam of

reason.

But in the languid brain of an idiot excitement may even produce rationality.

Samuel Tuke tells us of a domestic servant who lapsed into a state of complete idiocy. Some time after she fell into typhus fever, and as this progressed, there was a real development of mental power. At that stage, when delirium lighted up the minds of others, she was rational, because the excitement merely brought up the nervous energy to its proper point. As the fever abated, however, she sunk into her idiot apathy, and thus continued until she died. It was but the transient gleam of

reason.

FANTASY FROM CEREBRAL CONGES

TION.-OPIUM.

"Have we eaten of the insane root,

That takes the reason prisoner ?”—Macbeth.

Ev. The contrasts to these phantoms of blind superstition are those of the overstrained condition of the mind. The Creator has ordained the brain to be the soil in which the mind is implanted or developed. This brain, like the cornfield, must have its fallow, or it is exhausted and reduced in the degree of its high qualities. In our intellectual government, therefore, we should ever adopt that happy medium, equally remote from the bigotry of the untutored and the ultra-refinement of the too highly-cultivated mind.

It is not essential that I should now offer you more than a hint, that the essence of the gloomy ghosts of deep study, like the melancholy phan-. toms and oppressive demons of the nightmare, consists in the accumulation of black blood about the brain and the heart; and a glance at phrenology would explain to you how the influence of that blood on the various divisions of the brain will call up in the mind these "Hydras, and Gorgons, and Chimeras dire."

The learned Pascal constantly saw a gulf yawning at his side, but he was aware of his illusion. He was, however, always strapped in his chair, lest he should fall into this gulf, especially while he was working the celebrated problem of the cycloidal curve.

A distinguished nobleman, who but lately guided the helm of state in England, was often annoyed by the spectre of a bloody head; a strange coincidence with the phantom of the Count Duke d'Olivarez, the minister of Philip of Spain.

From Dr. Conolly we learn the curious illusion of a student of anatomy, who, during his ardent devotion to his study, confidently believed that there was a town in his deltoid muscle.

And, from Dr. Abercrombie, the case of a gentleman of high literary attainments, who, when closely reading in his study, was repeatedly annoyed by the intrusive visits of a little old woman in a black bonnet and mantle, with a basket on her arm. So filmy, however, was this phantom, that the door-lock was seen through her. Supposing she had mistaken her way, he politely showed her the door, and she instantly vanished. It was the change of posture which effected this disappearance, by altering the circulation of the brain-blood, then in a state of partial stagnation.

My friend, Dr. Johnson, has told me of a gentleman of great science, who conceived that he was honoured by the frequent visits of spectres. They were at first refined and elegant, both in manners and in conversation, which, on one occasion, assumed a witty turn, and quips, and puns, and satire were the order of the evening; so that he was charmed with his ghostly visiters, and sought no relief. On a sudden, however, they changed into demoniac fiends, uttering expressions of the most degraded and unholy nature. He became alarmed, and depletion soon cured him of his fantasy.

A Scotch lawyer had long laboured under this kind of monomania, which at length proved fatal. His physician had long seen that some secret grief was gnawing the heart and sucking the life-blood of his patient, and he at last extorted the confession that a skeleton was ever watching him from the foot of his bed. The physician tried various modes to dispel the illusion, and once placed himself in the field of the vision, and was not a little

H

terrified when the patient exclaimed that he saw the scull peering at him over his left shoulder.

The "Martyr Philosopher," too, in the "Diary of a Physician," saw, shortly preceding his death, a figure in black deliberately putting away the books in his study, throwing his pens and ink into the fire, and folding up his telescope, as if they were now useless. The truth is, he himself had been engaged in that occupation, but it was his own disordered imagination that raised the spectre.

You will believe from these illustrations, Astrophel, that Seneca is right in his aphorism,

"Nullum fit magnum ingenium sine misturâ dementiæ." And Pope, also, in his unconscious imitation,

"Great wits to madness nearly are allied."

Lord Castlereagh, when commanding in early life a militia regiment in Ireland, was stationed one night in a large, desolate country house, and his bed was at one end of a long, dilapidated room, while at the other extremity a great fire of wood and turf had been prepared within a huge, gaping, oldfashioned chimney. Waking in the middle of the night, he lay watching from his pillow the gradual darkening of the embers on the hearth, when suddenly they blazed up, and a naked child stepped from among them upon the floor. The figure advanced slowly towards Lord Castlereagh, rising in stature at every step, until, on coming within two or three paces of his bed, it had assumed the appearance of a ghastly giant, pale as death, with a bleeding wound on the brow, and eyes glaring with rage and despair. Lord Castlereagh leaped from his bed and confronted the figure in an attitude of defiance. It retreated before him, diminishing as it withdrew in the same manner that it had previously shot up and expanded; he follow