Pythoness; and through such channels does the Latin lyrist represent the Deity communicating with man: "quatit Mentem sacerdotum incola Pythius." But let us look into our own breasts, and acknowledge that, with all the fastidious pride of fancied superiority, and in the full plenitude of our undimmed reason, we cannot face the breathing ruin of a noble intellect undismayed. The broken sounds, the vague intensity of that gaze, those whisperings that seem to commune with the world of spirits, the play of those features, still impressed with the signet of immortality, though illegible to our eye, strike us with that awe which the obelisk of the desert, with its insculptured riddles, inspires into the Arabian shepherd. An oriental opinion makes such beings the favourites of Heaven: and the strong tincture of eastern ideas, so discernible on many points in Ireland, is here also perceptible; for a born idiot among the offspring of an Irish cabin is prized as a family palladium. To contemplate what was once great and resplendent in the eyes of man slowly mouldering in decay, has never been an unprofitable exercise of thought; and to muse over reason itself fallen and prostrate, cannot fail to teach us our complete deficiency. If to dwell among ruins and amid sepulchres-to explore the pillared grandeur of the tenantless Palmyra, or the crumbling wreck of that Roman amphitheatre once manned with applauding thousands and rife with joy, now overgrown with shrubs and haunted by the owl-if to soliloquize in the valley where autumnal leaves are thickly strewn, ever reminding us by their incessant rustle, as we tread the path, "that all that's bright must fade;"—if these things beget that mood of soul in which the suggestions of Heaven find readiest adoption,-how forcibly must the wreck of mind itself, and the mournful aberrations of that faculty by which most we assimilate to our Maker, humble our self-sufficiency, and bend down our spirit in adoration! It is in truth a sad bereavement, a dissevering of ties long cherished, a parting scene melancholy to witness, when the ethereal companion of this clay takes its departure, an outcast from the earthly coil that it once animated with intellectual fire, and wanders astray, cheerless and friendless, beyond the picturings of poetry to describe;a picture realised in Swift, who, more than Adrian, was entitled to exclaim: "Animula vagula, blandula, "Wee soul, fond rambler, whither, say, Nor unloath am I to confess that such contemplations have "Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men!" But to me, numbering fourscore years, and full tired of the "And may my lamp, at midnight hour, What realms or what vast regions hold To something like prophetic strain!" To fix the precise limits where sober reason's well-regulated dominions end, and at what bourne the wild region of the fanciful commences, extending in many a tract of lengthened wilderness until it joins the remote and volcanic terri tory of downright insanity,-were a task which the most deeply-read psychologist might attempt in vain. Hopeless would be the endeavour to settle the exact confines; for nowhere is there so much debateable ground, so much unmarked frontier, so much undetermined boundary. The degrees of longitude and latitude have never been laid down, nor, that I learn, ever calculated at all, for want of a really sensible solid man to act the part of a first meridian. The same remark is applicable to a congenial subject, viz. that state of the human frame akin to insanity, and called intoxication; for there are here also various degrees of intensity; and where on earth (except perhaps in the person of my friend Dick Dowden,) will you find, kara opera Kaι xara μov a SOBER man, according with the description in a hymn of our church liturgy? Qui pius, prudens, humilis, pudicus, Donec humanos levis afflat aurâ I remember well, when in 1815 the present Lord Chancellor (then simple Harry Brougham) came to this part of the country (attracted hither by the fame of our Blarneystone), having had the pleasure of his society one summer evening in this humble dwelling, and conversing with him long and loudly on the topic of inebriation. He had certainly taken a drop extra, but perhaps was therefore better qualified for debating the subject, viz. at what precise point drunkenness sets in, and what is the exact low water-mark. He first advocated a three-bottle system, but enlarged his view of the question as he went on, until he reminded me of those spirits described by Milton, who sat apart on a hill retired, discussing freewill, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute, "And found no end, in wandering mazes lost!" My idea of the matter was very simple, although I had some trouble in bringing him round to the true understanding of things; for he is obstinate by nature, and, like the village schoolmaster, whom he has sent “abroad,” "Even though vanquished, he can argue still." I I shewed him that the poet Lucretius, in his elaborate work "De Naturâ Rerum," had long since established a criterion, or standard-a sort of clepsydra, to ascertain the final departure of sobriety,-being the well-known phenomenon of reduplication in the visual orb, that sort of second-sight common among the Scotch : "Bina lucernarum flagrantia lumina flammis, LUCRETIUS, lib. iv. 452. But, unfortunately, just as I thought I had placed my opinions in their most luminous point of view, I found that poor Harry was completely fuddled, so as to be unconscious of all I could urge during the rest of the evening; for, as Tom Moore says in 'Lalla Rookh,' "the delicate chain Of thought, once tangled, could not clear again." It has long ago been laid down as a maxim by Seneca, that "nullum magnum ingenium sine mixturâ insaniæ." Newton was decidedly mad when he wrote his comment on Revelations; so, I think, was Napier of the logarithms, when he achieved a similar exploit; Burns was more than once labouring under delirium, of the kind called tremens; Tasso was acquainted with the cells of a madhouse; Nathaniel Lee,* the dramatist, This fact concerning Lee I stumbled on in that olla podrida, the "Curiosities of Literature," of the elder D'Israeli. In his chapter on the "Medicine of the Mind," (vol. i. second series: Murray, 1823), I find a passage which tells for my theory; and I therefore insert it here, on the principle of je prends mon bien partout où je le trouve : " Plutarch says, in one of his essays, that should the body sue the mind in a court of judicature for damages, it would be found that the mindwould prove to have been a most ruinous tenant to its landlord." This idea seemed to me so ingenious, that I searched for it through all the metaphysical writings of the Boeotian sage; and I find that Democritus, the laughing philosopher, first made the assertion about the Greek law of landlord and tenant retailed by him of Cheronæa: Οιμαι μαλιστα τον Δημοκριτον ειπείν, ώς ει το σωμα δικασαιτο τη ψυχή, κακώσεως ουκ αν αυτην αποφυγειν. Theophrastus enlarges on the same topic: Θεοφραστος αληθες ειπεν, πολυ τῳ σωματι τελειν ενοικιον την ψυχην. Πλείονα μεντοι το σωμα της ψυχης απολαύει κακα, μη κατα λόγον αυτῳ χρωμενος. See the magnificent edition of Plutarch's Moral Treatises, from the Clarendon press of Oxford, 1795, being пAоYт. TA нOIKA, tom. i. p. 375.PROUT. when a tenant of Bedlam, wrote a tragedy twenty-five acts long; and Sophocles was accused before the tribunal of the parpia, and only acquitted of insanity by the recitation of ais Edip. Colon. Pascal was a miserable hypochondriac; the poet Cowper and the philosopher Rousseau were subject to lunacy; Luis de Camoens died raving in an hospital at Lisbon; and, in an hospital at Madrid, the same fate, with the same attendant madness, closed the career of the author of "Don Quixote," the immortal Miguel Cervantes. Shelley was mad outright; and Byron's blood was deeply tainted with maniacal infusion. His uncle, the eighth lord, had been the homicide of his kindred, and hid his remorse in the dismal cloisters of Newstead. He himself enumerates three of his maternal ancestors who died by their own hands. Last February (1830), Miss Milbanke, in the book she has put forth to the world, states her belief and that of her advisers, that "the Lord Byron was actually insane." And in Dr. Millingen's book (the Surgeon of the Suliote brigade) we find these words attributed to the Childe: "I picture myself slowly expiring on a bed of torture, or terminating my days, like Swift, a grinning idiot."-Anecdotes of Byron's Illness and Death, by JULIUS MILLINGEN, p. 120.-London. Strange to say, few men have been more exempt from the usual exciting causes of insanity than Swift. If ambition, vanity, avarice, intemperance, and the fury of sexual passion, be the ordinary determining agents of lunacy, then should he have proudly defied the approaches of the evil spirit, and withstood his attacks. As for ambitious cravings, it is well known that he sought not the smiles of the court, nor ever sighed for ecclesiastical dignities. Though a churchman, he had none of the crafty, aspiring, and intriguing mania of a Wolsey or a Mazarin. By the boldness and can. dour of his writings, he effectually put a stop to that ecclesiastical preferment which the low-minded, the cunning, an1 the hypocrite, are sure to obtain: and of him it might be truly said, that the doors of clerical promotion closed while the gates of glory opened. But even glory (mystic word!), has it not its fascinations, too powerful at times even for the eagle eye of genius, and capable of dimming for ever the intellectual orb that gazes too fixedly on its irradiance ? How often has splendid |