M. de Buzareingries.

Sounds also may be partly associated with the dream at waking, and with reality, when awake. Under this illusive impression, even murder has been innocently
298 INCUBUS, OB NIGHT-MARE.
committed, on one, who waked, and stabbed his brother at the moment he was dreaming of assassins.
CAST. And so may be explained, I suppose, this funny anecdote. A young lover was drooping into a day-dream, while sitting with his brothers and sisters, and his thought had turned on the cruelty of his mis- tress. He was for a moment dreaming of her, when pussy, stretching her paws, scratched his leg with a claw : there was an instant association, I presume, of the wound with the lady's cruelty, for he started and exclaimed, " Oh Arabella, don't !"
Ev. Hippocrates quaintly alludes to the dreaming about seas and lakes as an indication of hydrothorax ; and to others, as symptomatic of effusion on the brain : and it has been asserted, that gloomy dreams in fevers indicate danger. But all this is hypothesis ; indeed, the delirious dreams of fever are often bright and cheerful.
The " Opium-Eater" has a strange fancy regarding his dreams of " silvery expanses of water ;" " these haunted me so much, that I feared that some dropsical state or tendency of the brain, might thus be making itself ob- jective, and the sentient organ project itself as its own object." I hope you understand this, Astrophel — I do not.
In the morbid condition of hypochondriasis, which is a sort of permanent daymare, similar fancies are excited. Esquirol's patient at Notre Dame thought the pope held council in her belly ; — her intestines were found closely adherent together. Another monomaniac thought the devil had stretched a cord across her stomach ; — her heart was adherent to its bag. Another believed that her body was stolen by the devil ; — she was in reality paralytic, and insensible to blows or pricking.
To explain some of these illusions, Jason Pratensis very gravely asserts, that "the devil being a slender incomprehensible spirit, can easily insinuate and wind
INCUBUS, OR NIGHT-MARE. 299
himself into human bodies, and, cunningly couched in our bowels, terrify our souls with fearful dreams."
I may add that we see, in some, a delirious trans- migration of sensation. Parkinson relates these cases. One referred his own sensation to others, telling his nurse that his visitors were hungry, while his own voracity plainly indicated that the hunger was in himself. Another, in a fit of intoxication, insisted on undressing all his family, as they were drunk, and could not do it themselves.
Now we certainly move ourselves unconsciously in our sleep as a relief from painful positions. If, how- ever, these uneasy sensations are increased from stag- nant blood about the heart and lungs, the oppression is extreme, and loads the moving powers; producing a transient agony and an intense effort. If this were un- successful on the limbs and speech, the result would be often destructive.
The night-mare dreamers are usually lethargic, and their ideas are often wild and visionary.
Polidori, the author of the ' ( Vampire/' was a prey to night-mare ; he died with a laudanum bottle in his bed. And Coleridge might have thus left a sad and pointed moral; blazojMBg-Jjis wretched suicide to that world, which unconsciously has pored with a thrill of admira- tion over those fruits of his delinquency, the romantic and unearthly stories of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner.
The grand feature of night-mare, then, is impediment : but how can I record all its varieties of miserable strug- gles ; of attacks and manglings from wild monsters : of the rolling of mountains on the heart: or the unhal- lowed embraces of a witch ?
The young lady who reads mythology, will fancy herself a syrinx, and struggle to escape from the amorous clutches of Pan. If we have been thinking of Cha-
300 INCUBUS, OB NIGHT-MARE.
mouni and her giant peaks of snow, we may be over- whelmed in our sleep by the fall of an avalanche ; or we may be dashed off a precipice, and feel ourselves falling into interminable space without a hope of resting.
A lady whom I know, and who is a frequent subject of night-mare, is very uniform in this dreamy occupa- tion. She is shaken to and fro in her bed by fiends, and the process seems to her to occupy considerable time. And there are many who are tortured by the feeling that they are buried alive, and attempt to cry out, and beat against their coffin-lid in vain. Aurelian writes, that the epidemics in Rome were premonished by incubus.
These, and thousands of a similar kind, might be cited ; but a vivid imagination, with a hint or two, will readily create them at its pleasure.
" A battalion of French soldiers, during the toils and dangers of a campaign, were, marching on a certain point on a most oppressive day, and at double the usual speed ; their strength was eight hundred men, all hardy, seasoned, and courageous ; careless of danger, despising the devil, and little occupied with the thoughts of ghosts and phantasmagoria. On the night of the occurrence in question, the battalion was forced to occupy a narrow and low building at Tropoea, barely calculated to accommodate three hundred persons. Nevertheless, they slept ; but, at midnight, one and all were roused by frightful screams issuing from all quar- ters of the house ; and to the eyes of the astonished and affrighted soldiers appeared the vision of a huge dog, which bounded in through the window, and rushed with extraordinary heaviness and speed over the breasts of the spectators. The soldiers quitted the building in terror. Next night, by the solicitations of the surgeon and chef-de-bataillon, who accompanied them, they again
INCUBUS, OR NIGHT-MAKK. 3(11
resumed their previous quarters. ' We saw,' says the narrator, e that they slept. We watched the arrival of the hour of the preceding panic, and midnight had scarcely struck when the veteran soldiers, for the second time, started to their feet. Again they had heard the supernatural voices, again the visionary hound had be- strode them to suffocation. The chef -de-bat aillon and myself heard or saw nothing of these events.' "
The superstitious thought this spectre to be the devil ; but the heat and carbonic acid gas were, I believe, enough for the excitement of the phantasm and the feeling.
There can scarcely be imagined a more terrific feeling than this sense of extreme danger, or difficulty, this intense impediment, without a power to avert it. The constant labour of Sisyphus, with his rolling-down stone, and the punishment of Tantalus, would yield in severity to the agony of night-mare, but for its transient existence.
It seems to me, that this want of balance between will and power influences human nature so much, that life itself may be termed one long and painful incubus. The actions we perform seldom reach the perfection which the will desires. Hence arises that constant dis- satisfaction, which even the close approach to perfection of some of the most accomplished professors of art and science cannot avert.
We must confess, with Socrates, that the extent of our knowledge is indeed but a conviction of our igno- rance. The metaphor of Sir Isaac Newton, on the in- significance of his own scientific attainments, is well known. Sir Joshua Reynolds so highly appreciated perfection in his art, that he was ever discontented with his own paintings ; and frequently, as I have heard, by repeated touches, destroyed the effect of a picture, which had been in its early stages beautiful. And Dr. John-
302 INCUBUS, OR NIGHT-MARE.
son, after astonishing the world with his perfect speci- men of lexicographical composition, confessed that he " had not satisfied his own expectations." May I add to these the frequent discontent of the unrivalled Paganini ?
IDA. The desire of the mind is, indeed, unlimited; and when this is intense, it wishes to appropriate to itself all which it can comprehend. But disappointment must ensue ; for all wish to be the whole, when they form but a part. Thus will ever be proved the futility of worldly ambition, — it is never satisfied. But the de- sires of religion are not a phantom, or an incubus. True devotion, which aspires to heaven, as the hart panteth for the water-brooks, will never fail. Its fer- vent hopes and devout prayers, we believe, will be blessed by their accomplishment.
CAST. Then the visitations of the incomparable Mab are nought but the infliction of the night-mare ? Gentle Master Evelyn, how should I be aweary of your philo- sophy, but that I am half won over to believe it true ? In good faith,
" The Gordian knot of it you do unloose Familiar as your garter."
Ev. Then, I pray you, let me counsel you not to court such visits, dear Castaly. There is some peril in the touch both of Mab and Mara ; for although rare and transient cases of night-mare excite no alarm, yet its repetition, in a severe form, is not to be slighted. It sometimes has been the forerunner of epilepsy ; its im- mediate cause being obstruction to the course of the blood by which the brain especially is surcharged, and the action of the lungs and heart impeded, as we prove by the extreme labour of breathing at the time we awake.
I believe that there is usually a fulness of blood, also,
6
INCUBUS, OR NIGHT-MARE. 303
in the vessels of the spinal marrow ; as, although night- mare may occur in the sitting, it is far more frequent in the recumbent position. Thus the marrow is oppressed, and there is then no force transmitted by the nerves to put the muscles into action.
Distention of the stomach should be prevented, as the diaphragm is thus pushed up against the lungs, and the gas is accumulated in the cavity. All these con- ditions often occur in our waking moods, but then our judgment tells us how to relieve them speedily ; whereas, in sleep, the load accumulates. All indigestible sub- stances, therefore, should be avoided, as nuts, cucumbers, shell-fish, &c.
Early and light suppers we advise to those whom Madame Mara so unmercifully overlies. A mattrass should be our couch, and we should endeavour to com- pose ourselves on one side, having, previous to our rest, taken gentle exercise.
SOMNILOQUENCE.— SOMNAMBULISM.
" It is a sleepy language ; and thou ipeak'tt Out of thy sleep." TEMPEST.
" Doct. You see, her eyes are open. Gent. Ay, but their itrue is shut."
" A great perturbation in nature. . To receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effect of watching." MACBETH.
Ev. In the common dream, ideas float through the mind, but the body is passive. When the power of ex- pressing these ideas by speech is added, it is somnilo- quence. When there is the conscious, yet powerless, will to move, it is incubus. When the unconscious power of moving in accordance with the ideas or wishes of the dream exists, it is somnambulism.
The common dreams of sleep are not unfolded to us until the waking recollections of the dreamer relate them ; but the matter of a dream may be half developed during its existence, by the curious propensity to un- conscious talking and walking in the sleep.
Sleep-talking is the slightest of these phenomena, and, indeed, closely resembles the speaking reveries of some absent people, and the raving of a maniac. The sleep is, at this time, little deeper than a reverie.
The voice of the somniloquist is usually natural, but
SOMNILOQUJ3NOE. 3O5
as again, in the cases of mania and of delirious excite- ment, a common voice may become sweetly melodious, and there will be an imparted fluency allied to the in- spiration of the improvisatore.
Indeed, in some young ladies, subject to hysteria, I have known, at certain periods as it were, a new accom- plishment— a style of singing which was far beyond their power in waking moments. Dr. Dewar relates a case of a girl who, when awake, discovered no know- ledge of astronomy or the sciences in any way; but when she was asleep she would define the rotations of the seasons, using expressions the most apt to the sub- ject, such as "the globe is now set agee." It is pro- bable that this was the memory in slumber of some geographical lesson which she had heard, but did not remember while her senses were active, that is, in her waking moments. And an American lady, during a fever, commenced a course of nocturnal prating, com- posing most eloquent sermons, chiefly made up, how- ever, of remembered texts of Scripture.
I am informed, too, that a lady of Edinburgh, during her somnolent attacks, recited somewhat lengthy poems ; and it was curious to notice that each line commenced with the final letter/of the preceding.
These sleep-talkings are sometimes the mere lispings of an idiot ; although Astrophel, perchance, may con- tend that the following, written down from the lips of a servant-maid, is a proof of special inspiration, convert- ing a rustic girl into an improvisatrice.
" You may go home and wash your hose, And wipe the dew-drops from your nose,
And mock no maiden here. For you tread down grass, and need not ; Wear your shoes, and speed not, And clout leather's very dear ; But I need not care, for my sweetheart Is a cobbler."
306 SOMNILOQUENCE.
I have heard this trash cited as a proof of facility of composition in slumber. You do not believe it such ; like other specimens, it was a ruse of a wanton girl to excite admiration. In the magnetic somnambulism of Elizabeth Okey, that cunning little wench, who was the prima buffa of the magnetic farces enacted at the North London Hospital, would often skip about and sing snatches of equal elegance:
" I went into a tailor's shop To buy a suit of clothes ; But where the money came from, G — Almighty knows."
These are indeed the very burlesque of somniloquence. And yet Okey was an invalid, and presumed on the credulity of those who ministered to her.
True somniloquence is often preceded by a cataleptic state ; and in girls like this, the senses are often so dull, that the firing of a pistol close to the ear does not rouse them, until the poetic fit is over.
CAST. Were sleep-talking more common, it would indeed be a very dangerous propensity. If the con- fessor were to prate in his sleep of the peccadilloes of the fair penitents that kneel at his confessional ; if the minister on his couch were to divulge his state secrets or his fine political schemes ; where would be the tran- quillity of domestic or national society ? Yet the lips of the love-sick maiden have not seldom whispered in sleep her bosom's secret; and sometimes the uncon- scious tongue has awfully betrayed even the blood-stain on the hand.
Thus did the ill-mated Parisina of Byron :
" Fever'd in her sleep she seems, And red her cheek with troubled dreams ; And mutters she, in her unrest, A name she dare not breathe by day."
SOMNAMBULISM. 307
The fate of Eugene Aram, I believe, may be imputed to such an unfortunate propensity ; and in Lady Mac- beth's "Out, damned spot!" was confessed her partici- pation in the murder of Duncan and the grooms.
Somewhat like this, too, was the half-sleeping excla- mation of Jarvis Matcham, after he had committed the murder of the drummer boy. Starting from his bed, when roused by the waiter, his first words were : " My God ! I did not kill him."
Ev. A dream will sometimes half wake even a child to a state of terror, although children are with difficulty completely roused. I have known instances in which children would sit up in bed, with their eyes open, sobbing, and talking, and staring, in a sort of trance ; nay, they will sometimes start from bed, but still asleep, and, after a time becoming calm, they have again com- posed themselves to slumber.
I have known sleep-talkers, who have not remembered one iota of their wanderings when awake ; and even the ecstatic somnambulist, who pretends to prophecy wisdom, recollects nothing when the ecstacy is over. It is clear also, that the mind varies in sleep and wak- ing, in regard to its .memory ; for it has been proved that persons who often talk in their sleep, have renewed the exact points of a subject which terminated their last sleep-talking, although, in the waking interval, it was to them oblivion.
Somnambulism is the most perfect paradox among the phenomena of sleep, as it exhibits actions without a consciousness of them ; indeed, so complete a suspen- sion of sensibility, that contact, nay, intense inflictions, do not produce that mental consciousness which is calculated to excite alarm, or even attention.
There is a somewhat remote analogy to this, in the want of balance between the judgment and volition of ambitious minds. In the campaign of Russia, Napo-
x 2
308 SOMNAMBULISM.
Icon's inarch was a sort of somnambulism, for he must have been madly excited to action against his better judgment. In this he forms a curious contrast with his royal predecessor ; for in Louis XVI. we observe a mind that might conceive great things, but which voli- tion hesitated to accomplish.
The points of the mystery of somnambulism were never more forcibly illustrated, to my own mind, than in the following cases :
In 1833, a man was brought before Alderman Thorp, who had a parcel cut from his arm, although he had strapped it tightly on to prevent this, as he was often falling asleep, even during his walk. Yet, even then, he usually took the parcels to their proper directions.
The crew of a revenue boat on the coast of Ireland, about two o'clock in the morning, picked up a man swimming in the water. He had, it appeared, left his house about twelve ; and walked two miles over a most dangerous path, and had swum about one mile. After he was taken into the boat, he could not be persuaded that he was not still in his warm bed at home.
In 1834, Marie Pau was admitted into the hospital at Bordeaux, her left hand and arm covered with deep and bleeding gashes, its tendons projecting and the bones broken. She had, in her sleep, gone into a loft to cut wood with a hedging bill. Thinking she was cutting the wood, she had hacked her fore-arm and hand, until she fainted away, and fell bathed in her blood. She had felt no pain, but merely had a sensation as if the parts were pricked with pins.
Some time ago, (I believe in the year 1832,) a journal thus records a case analogous in its nature, although less unhappy in its effects :
" Some fishermen at Le Conquest, near Brest, were surprised at finding, at two o'clock in the morning, a boy about twelve years old, up to his waist in the sea,
SOMNAMBULISM. 309
fishing for flounders, of which he drew up five or six. Their surprise however was increased to wonder, when, on approaching him, they found that he was/as^ asleep. He was taken home and put to bed, but was imme- diately afterwards attacked with a raging fever.
IDA. These walkers were of low degree ; I presume philosophy is not altogether exempt from the fault.
Ev. Oh no: Galen was a somnambulist ; and Frank- lin assures us, that in a warm bath at Southampton, he floated on his back nearly an hour in his sleep.
Now that there is an apathy of the senses during somnambulism is clear, for the eyelids are unclosed, and if a candle be held to the eye of the somnambulist, the actions of the iris are seen, but there is seldom aversion of the head to avoid the glare. Was Mrs. Siddons aware of this, when she smelt to her bloody hand, but did not look upon it ? In sleep-walking, in- deed, there is always one at least of the five senses asleep. The actions of somnambulists often appear almost automatic without a reason for them ; somewhat resembling instinct, as the beaver will still build his dome for shelter, even under a roof; or as monomaniacs will do a work in thre^TorJour different places, forgetful of their previous labour. It is evident, too, that there is a dulness of reflection when the progress is impeded. The somnambulist will try to move on in a straight line, overturning things in his course : thus Mathews, in Somno, overturned the tables, but had not the judgment to go round them. Under very great obstruction to their progress, the somnambulists will sometimes burst into tears.
Gall relates the case of a miller, who every night got up and worked in his mill, asleep ; and Martinet, of a saddler, who also worked nightly in his sleep ; and Dr. Pritchard, of one who had been subject to epileptic fits, thus : " They ceased entirely until the nineteenth year
310 SOMNAMBULISM.
of his age, when he became a somnambulist, working during the night at his trade as a saddler, getting out on the roof of the house, going out to walk, and occu- pying himself in a thousand various ways. Soon after this the fits of epilepsy reappeared, occurring every five or six days, increasing in duration, and commenc- ing from that time only with a sensation of heat, which from the epigastrium rapidly extended to the head, and produced complete insensibility. He was, at various times, relieved by bleeding ; and, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, being then a soldier, he escaped three months without a return of his epilepsy. In the following year, he was astonished to find himself one night on the roof of the house, wet with rain ; the im- pression which he thence conceived, produced, some time afterwards, an attack of epilepsy, followed by contraction of his fingers and toes."
In many cases, however, there is some predetermi- nate motive for the walk, which . excites the memory in the sleep. The somnambulist has been thinking deeply, ere he retires to rest, and the walk occurs early in the night ; so that we might believe a mood of musing had really prevented sleep, and itself been the cause of the phenomena.
Thus may be explained the miracle recorded by Ful- gosius. Marcus, the freedman of Pliny, dreamed that a barber, sitting on his bed, had shaved him, and awoke well trimmed; — Marcus had unconsciously shaved himself.
And also other cases related by Dr. Pritchard, of which I will offer you a fragment.
" He is just recovering from a singular state of
reverie, in which he has passed twenty-four hours. It began in the evening, with a rigor, which continued more or less the whole night. From that time he re- mained constantly in motion, walking up and down the room or about the house. He kept his eyes open, but
SOMNAMBULISM. 311
was unconscious of external impressions ; sometimes he muttered to himself, and by his gestures and the mo- tions of his hands it appeared that he fancied himself to be working in his usual occupation. In this state he remained all the ensuing night and a part of the following day. During that time, he never ate or drank any thing in a natural manner ; he sometimes caught hold of a piece of bread, and, having bitten it hastily, threw it down, and drank in the same way, immediately continuing his work. If he was spoken to, he was some time without taking any notice, and then would reply hastily, as a person does who is disturbed by a question when in a reverie."
Our study of these curiosities of mind teaches us how intimately combined in their essence are all the species of illusion.
Somnambulism is a very common feature in epileptic idiots. In confirmed insanity also, we observe in an intense degree that fearless daring and almost preter- natural power which characterise somnambulism. A Highland woman, in a state of puerperal mania, which was increased by a terrific dream, escaped to the gorges of the mountain, and ^herded with the deer. She be- came so fleet of foot that it was impossible to overtake her. One day, an awful tempest drove her and her " velvet companions" to the valleys, when she was se- cured. Providence, which "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," had covered her body with hair.
The dreamer walks and talks with imaginary people, — spectral illusion. The following is a perfect illustra- tion of this night-fantasy. It is a story told to Sir Walter Scott by a Lisbon trader : —
" Somnambulism and other nocturnal deceptions lend their aid to the formation of such phantasmata as are formed in the middle state betwixt sleeping and waking. A most respectable person, whose active life had been
312 SOMNAMBULISM.
spent as master and part-owner of a large merchant vessel in the Lisbon trade, gave an account of such an instance, which came under his observation. He was lying in the Tagus, when he was put to great anxiety and alarm by the following incident and its conse- quences : — One of his crew was murdered by a Portu- guese assassin, and a report arose that the ghost of the slain man haunted the vessel. Sailors are generally superstitious, and those of my friend's vessel became unwilling to remain on board the ship ; and it was pro- bable they might desert, rather than return to England with the ghost for a passenger. To prevent so great a calamity, the captain determined to examine the story to the bottom. He soon found that, though all pre- tended to have seen lights and heard noises, and so forth, the weight of the evidence lay upon the state- ment of one of his own mates, an Irishman and a catho- lic, which might increase his tendency to superstition ; but in other respects a veracious, honest, and sensible person, whom Captain S. had no reason to suspect would wilfully deceive him. He affirmed to Captain S., with the deepest obtestations, that the spectre of the murdered man appeared to him almost nightly, took him from his place in the vessel, and, according to his own expression, worried his life out. He made these communications with a degree of horror, which inti- mated the reality of his distress and apprehensions. The captain, without any argument at the time, pri- vately resolved to watch the motions of the ghost-seer in the night, whether alone, or with a witness, I have forgotten. As the ship-bell struck twelve, the sleeper started up with a ghastly and disturbed countenance, and lighting a candle proceeded to the galley, or cock- room, of the vessel. He sat down with his eyes open, staring before him, as on some terrible object which he beheld with horror, yet from which he could not
SOMNAMBULISM. 313
withhold his eyes. After a short space he arose, took up a tin can or decanter, filled it with water, muttering to himself all the while, mixed salt in the water, and sprinkled it about the galley. Finally, he sighed deeply, like one relieved from a heavy burden, and, returning to his hammock, slept soundly. In the next morning, the haunted man told the usual precise story of his apparition, with the additional circumstances that the ghost had led him to the galley ; but that he had for- tunately, he knew not how, obtained possession of some holy water, and succeeded in getting rid of his unwel- come visitor. The visionary was then informed of the real transactions of the night, with so many particulars as to satisfy him he had been the dupe of his imagina- tion. He acquiesced in his commander's reasoning, and the dream, as often happens in these cases, returned no more after its imposture had been detected."
The case I am about to relate occurred within my own experience.
A butcher's boy, about sixteen years old, apparently in perfect health, after dosing a few minutes in his chair, suddenly started up, and began to employ him- self about his usual ^vocations. He had saddled and mounted his horse, and it was with the greatest diffi- culty that those around him could remove him from the saddle and carry him within doors. While he was held in the chair by force, he continued violently the actions of kicking, whipping, and spurring. His observations regarding orders from his master's customers, the pay- ment at the turnpike-gate, &c. were seemingly rational. The eyes when opened were perfectly sensible to light. It appears that flagellation even had no effect in restor- ing the patient to a proper sense of his condition. The pulse in this case was 130, full and hard; on the abstraction of thirty ounces of blood it sunk to 80, and diaphoresis ensued. After labouring under thi>
314 SOMNAMBULISM.
phrenzy for the space of an hour, he became sensible ; was astonished at what he was told had happened, and stated that he recollected nothing subsequent to his having fetched some water and moved from one chair to another, which indeed he had done immediately before his delirium came on.
CAST. In the monastery of , this story was told
to a party of Alpine travellers, to beguile our winter's evening.
A melancholic nobleman of Italy, Signer Augustin, walked usually at the waning of the moon. The walk was always preceded by his lying on his back, with eyes fixed and open. At this time the beatings of his heart were scarcely perceptible. During this state, he noticed none of his companions around him ; but if any noise was made by them, his steps were hurried and agitated, and if the noise was increased, a sort of ma- niacal state was induced. In his sleep he would saddle and mount his horse, he would listen at a key-hole if he heard noises in another room, and, if he entered his billiard-room, he would seem to be playing with the cue. On returning to his bed, he usually slept for ten hours after his walk. Tickling would always rouse him.
In a Gazette of Augsburg, I have read this sad story : " Dresden was the theatre of a melancholy spectacle on the 20th ult. As early as seven in the morning a female was seen walking on the roof of one of the loftiest houses in the city, apparently occupied in preparing some ornaments as a Christmas present. The house stood as it were alone, being much higher than those adjoining it, and to draw her from her perilous situation was impossible. Thousands of spectators had assem- bled in the streets. It was discovered to be a handsome girl, nineteen years of age, the daughter of a master baker, possessing a small independence bequeathed to
SOMNAMBULISM. 315
her by her mother. She continued her terrific prome- nade for hours, at times sitting on the parapet and dressing her hair. The police came to the spot, and various means of preservation were resorted to. In a few minutes the street was thickly strewn with straw, and beds were called for from the house, but the heart- less father, influenced by the girl's stepmother, refused them. Nets were suspended from the balcony of the first floor, and the neighbours fastened sheets to their windows. All this time the poor girl was walking in perfect unconsciousness, sometimes gazing toward the moon, and at others singing or talking to herself. Some persons succeeded in getting on the roof, but dared not approach her for fear of the consequences if they awoke her. Towards eleven o'clock she approached the very verge of the parapet, leaned forwards, and gazed upon the multitude beneath. Every one felt that the mo- ment of the catastrophe had arrived. She rose up, however, and returned calmly to the window by which she had got out. When she saw there were lights in the room she uttered a piercing shriek, which was re- echoed by thousands below, and fell dead into the street."
Such would have been the result, according to poe- tical justice, in the beautiful romance of " La Sonnam- bula." Had Amina been awakened while she was descending, she would probably have toppled down headlong !
Ev. Custom would render these wakings less formid- able perhaps. There was a family alluded to by Dr. Willis, in which the father and many sons jostled each other nightly in their sleep-walk. This was probably but a cheerful recognition and to sleep again.
In Eraser's Magazine is recorded a very curious story of this sort. If I remember right, an individual had the mortification of discovering every morning when he
6
316 SOMNAMBULISM.
awoke, that the shirt in which he had slept was gone. Some trick was supposed to have been played upon him by an inmate of the house ; and, thinking that the practical joke would soon be abandoned, he went on day after day, till his stock of linen was completely ex- hausted. The individuals of the family were now anxiously examined, but no tidings of the stray linen could be obtained. It was at last suspected that some depredator had entered the house and unswathed his sleeping victim, and a strict watch was made on the following night. At a suitable hour the somnambulist was seen to quit his bed, to pass through a skylight window to the roof of the house, to enter by another window a garret that was always locked, and to return shirtless to his lair. The garret was examined, and the thousand and one shirts were found carefully wrapped up and deposited in a pyramid.
Something like this is the story of the spectre of Tappington, in the Ingoldsby legends.
The actions, therefore, unlike the ideas of a dream, are often neither heterogeneous nor inconsistent, and it is astonishing to observe the exactness with which the work is executed.
Dr. Pritchard tells the case of a farmer who arose, saddled his horse, and rode to market in his sleep : the Archbishop of Bordeaux the case of a student, who composed both theological essays and music thus unconsciously.
Now if the dreamer be awakened, he will relate the circumstances of his dream clearly ; but the somnam- bulist, if roused, will generally express himself uncon- scious of what he intended, or of what he had done. It is, by the bye, often dangerous, on another account, to wake the sleep-walker; indeed, we have recorded the case of a young lady who was walking in a garden in her sleep ; she was awoke, and almost instantly died.
SOMNAMBUI.I-M. 317
But in some future somnambulism the same act inns will be again performed unheeded. And if there be memory of the sleep-walk, the somnambulist, I believe, always relates his actions as the mere ideas of a dream, and is long a sceptic of the fact, even if there are visible signs of his exertions.
CAST. 7 can illustrate this question from the recol- lection and knowledge of an ancestor of my own. Early on a morning, an immense number of foot-prints were observed by the men about a gate (on a farm in Sussex), which were not there overnight. On their return the servant girl was relating her dream ; that she was told the cows had got into a wrong field, and that she had gone out, opened the gate, and driven them back. And I remember reading that a young gentleman of Bren- stein was seen to rise, get out of his window on the roof, and take a brood of young magpies from their nest, and wrap them in his cloak. He then returned quietly to his bed, and in the morning related his dream to his two brothers. They had slept with him, and had witnessed this feat, of which he would not be persuaded until they showed him the birds in his cloak.
I interrupt you, EvelyriT"
Ev. It is evident, as in dreams, and in rare cases of disease, that the mind of the somnambulist is often a contrast to its waking faculty. The memory will leap over intervals. Dr. Dyce records an illustration of this. A girl, in a state of somnambulism, was taken to church, and wept at the subject of the sermon. She never ad- verted to this impression when she awoke ; nor could she be brought to recollect it until, in her next sleeping paroxysm, she spoke of it distinctly.
In delirium, also, we see these intervals of thought. The patient will commence a subject in the delirious state ; when this has subsided, the subject is dropped. In the next attack of delirium it will again be started,
318 ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING.
ay, and at the very point, even the word itself, at which it was broken off.
We read, in an American journal, that a man, pre- vious to an attack of mania which lasted several years, had placed his work tools in the hollow of a tree. To them no allusion was made during the period of his disorder. When, however, this passed off, he directed his son to fetch them, believing that he left them only yesterday.
In the same book, too, we learn of that lady who be- came maniacal as she was engaged in needle-work. For seven years she thought not of this ; but directly she recovered, she asked for her needle-work and canvass. The same may occur in intoxication also, which is but another form of delirium. In Mr. Combe's work we are told of a drunken man who left a parcel at a wrong house. When sober, he recollected nothing of the cir- cumstance ; but when again intoxicated, he soon re- membered his error, and reclaimed the parcel.
ASTB. These cases form high contrasts with Ham- let's proof of insanity :
" Bring me to the test,
And I the matter will reword, which madness Wou'd gambol from."
Ev. Yet if you analyze their nature you will find them even proofs of derangement ; for you thus see that the faculty of memory is changed according to the state of mind. In the following case, by Dr. Abercrombie, we shall find the same variation in impression and taste. A girl, in her early youth, expressed her abhor- rence of tunes played on the violin, which she termed a discordant fiddle. She was after this introduced into more refined society, and became a somnambulist. During her paroxysm she imitated the beautiful airs which she said she had formerly heard on this same violin.
ANALYSIS OP SLEEP-WALKING. 319
Lieutenant C was once my patient, and died ;i
maniac. The insanity arose from thwarted ambition, and was confirmed by his notion that he had seen his death-fetch. For some time he walked and talked in his sleep; subsequently he would walk for an hour round the table unconsciously. In him, too, was this change of feeling. He once talked little, and cared less for his child ; but now he would caress it fondly, and expressed the deepest anxiety for it. It was difficult to decide, at times, whether this gentleman was awake or not; indeed, these states of mania, which have been termed " melancholia errabunda" by Bellini and Mont- alti, are closely allied to somnambulism, for the walker is absorbed in deep thought, and totally unconscious of his actions. And the analogy appears to have been re- cognised by the law. It is well known that the brother of Lord Colepeper, who was a great dreamer and som- nambulist, shot a guardsman and his horse. He was found guilty ; but he was pardoned on the ground of his complete unconsciousness in his somnambulism.
We do not wonder more to see the perfection with which these unconscious labours of the somnambidist are performed, than at the ease and power which is evinced, and the very slight fatigue which ensues; although the occupation might have been most la- borious.
As in chorea the most delicate girls will dance inces- santly for twenty-four hours, resting merely for one sole hour ; and yet they will sit down perfectly cool and free from fatigue.
IDA. Is it not wonderful that the somnambulist will incur great dangers with complete sang-froid ? They will walk over
" Torrents roaring loud,
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear ;"
or scale the gigantic precipice, the mere contemplation
320 ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING.
of which would fright their mind from its propriety, when awake. I remember to have read of a French Jew, who walked by chance across a dangerous pass over a brook, in the dark, without the slightest fear or harm. The next day, perceiving what danger he had incurred, he fell down dead.
Ev. It is equally curious that a concentration of nervous energy, which is here the result of unconscious- ness, should also be produced by fear in some cases, which, in others, paralyses ; but this is indeed a slight degree of heroism, or energy of despair. Thus we leap far higher, and run much faster, when danger threatens, than we could believe.
These are all very apt illustrations of somnambulism. I will check myself in quotations of more, as the phe- nomena may closely resemble each other.
But what is its philosophy, and how can I venture on its explanation, which involves the most intricate pathology of the nervous system ? unless, with the self- complacency of quaint old Burton, I cut the Gordian knot by this affirmation, — " There is nothing offends but a concourse of bad humours, which trouble the phantasy; These vapours move the phantasy, the phantasy the appetite, which, moving the animal spirits, causeth the body to walk up and down, as if it were awake."
Thus much I may expound to you, if I am again allowed to run up our scientific scale. The philosophy of the dream and of incubus refers to the activity of the brain with a passive body ; for somnambulism, we re- quire an active body, with an unconscious brain.
Now there are four sources of nervous influence : — the brain and cerebellum, within the skull ; the marrow in the spinal canal ; and the nervous bundles in the large cavities, termed ganglia.
It is on the independent or unconscious function of
ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING. 321
the marrow, chiefly, that those mysterious actions, which do not seem to be willed by a conscious mind, depend.
In the day-dream, a thought or form shall present itself, even at a time when the mind is employed on subjects of a contrasted nature. These thoughts, or forms, are usually fraught with a high degree of plea- sure or of pain, or refer to events of vital importance, to the dreamer; — such are the objects of the lover's idolatry, the anticipation of misfortune, or subjects of prospective felicity. Under this excitement, the in- fluence of external objects is often for a time lost ; the retina may be struck by a ray, or the membrana tympani by a vibration, but the mind shall fail in its perception, — no internal impression being made. This cannot arise from a point of the retina, or the expansion of the auditory nerve being pre-occupied, as some have sup- posed. The idea of material impression must fail in explanation ; for, on the instant that the mind is awak- ened, the external impression is again perceived. The external sense, in this case, is not in fault ; nor is its direct influence on the sensorium suspended ; for we find that a person will continue to read in this state, as it were mechanically ; but the attention is diverted by deep thought, so that the reader, at the end of his task, may have no remembrance of what he has been reading.
Let me tell of a curious little episode of Dr. Darwin's, which will aid me in my illustration. A young lady was playing on the piano a very elaborate piece of music. It was correctly and scientifically performed, although she was agitated during her task; and when it was over, the lady burst into tears. She had been watching all the time a favourite canary in the flutter- ing of death ; and with this catastrophe her mind was almost wholly occupied, but her fingers did not err in
322 ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING.
their complicated and delicate motions, which they un- doubtedly would have done, if the will or mind alone had directed them.
In sanity of mind, and in mania, the most philo- sophical distinction is based on the health or disease of memory. The ecstacy of madness may not seem per- haps more irrational than an ecstatic vision, but the maniac will not re-word the matter ; whereas the mere visionary will repeat the action of the trance as a dream.
ASTR. But there is a sort of somnambulism the re- verse of this. In the retreat to Corunna, many of the soldiers, although exhausted by a long march, and hav- ing actually fallen asleep, continued to move forwards, leaving their companions behind, who halted and laid down to repose.
Ev. This is the continued association of that excite- ment which has produced muscular motion. The mind was exhausted and sleepy, the .brain was inert; but we believe that the spinal marrow does, of itself, effect motion, while the will and consciousness sleep ; and we may also stand and sleep. These soldiers did not walk in then* sleep, but slept in their walk.
ASTR. I am informed, too, that Richard Turpin, in allusion to his famous flight to York, asserted that Black Bess appeared to gallop unconsciously.
Ev. It is true ; and when we reflect on this gigantic feat, we may suppose that the mare gallopped the far- ther, because her consciousness of fatigue was not awake, and her muscular energy was thus concentrated.
Paralyzed muscles will often quiver when the sound limb is quiet ; the brain's influence being, in this case too, inert, sensation is diminished ; but involuntary motion continues from a habit in the muscle, or the ex- citement of unexhausted irritability, as in chorea, spasm, &c. And in some cases of post mortem galvanism, Dr.
ANALYSIS OP SLEEP-WALKING. 323
Dunbar, of Virginia, passed the galvanic aura along the ulnar nerve of an executed negro, and the fingers in- stantly quivered, and assumed the attitude and action of one playing on a flute or the strings of a violin.
ASTB. It is possible, then, to move without our vrill- ing to do so, or being conscious of our act.
Ev. There are believed to be, indeed it is almost a demonstration, — -four sets of nerves, traced along the spinal marrow. Two to the brain, of sensation and volition, by which the mind feels what the body touches, and transmits its will to the muscles ; two others to the marrow, by which it also is stimulated by outward touch, and by which it excites the muscles to motion.
Now when the brain's influence is kept from muscle, that muscle will still possess irritability, derived from the spinal marrow ; nay, that irritabili ty will be greater, be- cause it has not been expended by the acts of that volition, which resides solely in the brain, and which is now cut off. Thus the excito-motory function, and the influence of. volition, are in these cases antagonists. And this principle of the incident and reflex spinal nerve is an explanation of the curious dilemma, regarding the sus- pension of the will in sleep and dream, to which Dr. Stewart alludes. — "Not a suspension of volition, but only of its influence over those organs, which it moves when we are awake." Decide for yourselves between the physical and metaphysical theories.
Yet, do you not see that all this does not essentially require the direction of mind ? If you tickle the palm of a sleeping child, it will close its hand upon your finger ; if you awake it, and engage its attention, it will often leave its hold. This is a fact proved by the anencephalous or brainless children. Even the puppy, deprived of its brain, and also the mammary foetuses of the kangaroo and opossum, fix eagerly on the nipple when it touches their lips. There is a beautiful me-
Y 2
324 ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING.
chanism in the foot of the roosting birds, adapted to this physiological law. The tendon of the claws is tightened immediately they are touched, by which action they contrive to grasp the bough or perch even when asleep. In cases of paralysis even, the foot will some- times be instantly drawn up, although it does not pos- sess the least sensation ; we may assert, then, that irri- tability is in an inverse ratio to sensibility.
The polype, in which we trace no brain or nerve, ex- ists and moves by its irritability, and without sensation or consciousness. We know also that the vis insita, or vis nervosa of a muscle, that is, its irritability, exists even after the animal life has ceased. The turtle will live and move long after its brain has been removed. The heart itself, an involuntary muscle, is stimulated also to action without sensation. The heart of the assassin, Bellingham, beat long after he was cut from the gallows.
If I have made these things, clear, I am now pre- pared to explain, with some anticipation, those two curious contrasts, somnambulism and incubus. If the spinal or motive nerves be asleep, and the cerebral or intellectual, or volition nerves, awake, we shall have night-mare ; if, on the contrary, the motive nerves are in excess, beyond the sensiferous or volition nerves, we have sleep-walking.
ASTR. I believe the philosophy of Leibnitz affirms two perceptions ; one with, and another without, con- sciousness. I do not recollect if he distinguishes the seat of these perceptions ; but, if the brain be that which perceives, I presume consciousness will follow that per- ception sometimes in so slight a degree as not to excite judgment or reflection. Am I correct ?
Ev. You have adopted the common error of meta- physicians. If, in the abstraction of waking moments, some persons talk to themselves, as it were uncon-
ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING. 325
sciously, so, from the reflex influence, may volition and motion occur, with as little self-feeling. That the im- mediate impression, however, and a necessity of action, may combine, is illustrated by Dr. Beattie's case of the officer who could be thus excited in his sleep. By a whisper in his ear, he was induced to go through the whole ceremony of a duel, and did not completely wake until the report of his pistol roused him. This gentle- man was also told that he had fallen overboard, and he began to imitate the motions of swimming ; then that a shark was following him, when he would dive off his couch upon the floor ; and when he was told that the battle was raging around him, he proved himself an arrant coward by running away.
Somnambulism may be induced by congestion or irritation of that point where the incident nerve blends with the grey matter of the spinal marrow, producing internal irritation, as the tickling of the foot does through the cutaneous nerves of a senseless limb.
CAST. We are thankless creatures, dear Evelyn, but all this reiteration bewilders me, does it not you, Ida ? Yet, in my simplicity, I can but think it unphilosophi- cal entirely to disregard the will as the spring of our actions.
Ev. If I must EXPLAIN, fair lady, I cannot avoid prolixity. But to your question I will answer, no ; for somnambulism may be excited by the memory of an in- tention. In the experiment made by the committee of the physical society of Lausanne, on the Sieur Devaud, of Vevay, it was proved that on the evening before the fit of somnambulism, his head was heavy, and he had a sense of oppression on his eye-lids. If, at this time, the mind was impressed by some legend, or story, or inci- dent, the actions of the sleep-walk were perfectly coin- cident with such a subject. If a romantic tale of banditti were related, his alarm would be apparent in his sub-
326 ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING.
sequent sleep. In this somnambulist was beautifully illustrated the effect of permanent impression on the brain, rendering, for a time, the sense of vision useless ; for having once perused his paper, it was so imprinted on his mind, that the exact spot for each letter was exactly fixed on by the finger. And we have heard of one more interesting case, in which the somnambule, remembering that he had made errors in his writing, traced, on a blank paper substituted for that written on, the corrections, in the very places corresponding to the erroneous writing. And that here was memory was proved in this, that during the time his eyes were shut, the pen was dropped on the very spot where the ink- stand stood ; but this being removed, no ink was ob- tained, and the writing was blank.
Now we believe that there are certain vessels which contribute to nervous energy, perhaps by secreting a nervous fluid in the brain, or by concentrating electricity, which Dr. Faraday believes may constitute the animal portion of the nervous system. This influence may be profusely accumulated in a waking state ; the resolution to act has been formed; or, there may be a rapid pro- duction in sleep of this energy. Then, when sleep occurs, this impression becomes uncontrolled. The third form of insanity of Spurzheim, irresistibility, exists, and the night-walk takes place. And indeed it may form an interesting analogy to that satiety of the voluptuary, « Childe Harold,"
" Who e'en for change of scene wou'd seek the shades below,"
and to one unhallowed story related in " Salmonia."
From this excess there is the stimulus of pain to move ; one of the most powerful motives of human action. Cardan, if we may believe in his " Opera et Vita," was at least a monomaniac ; and he " was wont instinctively, as it were, to relieve this tendency of his mind by the
ANALYSIS OP SLEEP-WALKING. 327
excitement of bodily pain." I may assure you that I have, during my professional studies, often witnessed (and indeed have sometimes suggested) a remedy on this knowledge : you may be aware, that a severe and pain- ful disorder will mitigate, if not entirely dissipate, that apathetic misery which springs from a vacant or unoc- cupied mind.
In contrasting childhood and age, we witness these curiosities in the restless activity of youth and early manhood, for at these periods we are very constant somnambulists ; not so in the passive state of old age, in which sleep-walking is very rare. Something of this we see also in the growing pains and fidgets of girls and those whose duties are sedentary. Exercise is the relief for all this.
Now when the sleep-walk has exhausted this excess of irritability or electricity (if it be so), the dreamer re- turns to bed and sleep. A hint is here thrown out to us, that if powerful exertion be employed previous to sleep, the night-walk might not ensue. Lethargy often terminates in somnambulism.
If I may for another moment still prose over the in- tricate, but deeply interesting question of the pathology of somnambulism, I will observe, that we often find it one symptom of madness or idiocy, and we know that somnambulism not seldom terminates in epilepsy.
In the brains of epileptic idiots, who are very deter- mined somnambulists, we discover changes the most various; effusion, congestion, ossification of membranes, ramollissement, indurcissement, bony spicufa, or points pressing the brain, tubercles, cysts. In some, the skull assumes the density of ivory. Yet in those persons who have been known to be sleep-walkers, the inspec- tion is seldom satisfactory. Plethora of the head has often, however, preceded the sleep-walk. Signer Pozzi, physician to Benedict XIV., if he submitted not to de-
328 ANALYSIS OF SLEEP-WALKING.
pletion each second month, became a somnambulist; and we have known that in chorea, previous to the dance, and in some cases of somnambulism also, pain has been felt from the occiput along the course of the spinal marrow. This is from immediate excitement; but dyspepsia and other abdominal derangements may so influence the ganglia and nerves of organic life, and through them the brain and cord, as to excite sleep- walking by remote sympathy.
That injuries of the nervous matter about the nape of the neck are of the highest importance in our studies of these eccentric actions, is certain. The experiments of Flourens show that the progressive or forward motion of animals, is influenced by varied states of the cere- bellum. When Majendie cut through the corpora striata, the animal darted forward ; when the pons Varolii was cut, the animal rolled over sixty times in a minute.
When a soldier is struck by a ball about the cervical vertebrae, he often springs from the ground and drops dead.
It is our duty, then, not to slight the condition of the somnambulist. If simple irritation be its exciting cause, much benefit may be derived from counter-action on the surface, and other remedial means. Even if there be diseased structure, some palliation may be af- forded. As preventives of the fit, we may inculcate an abstinence from late meals, exercise in the evening pre- vious to retirement to rest, a high pillow, &c.
If the propensity continue in spite of our efforts, it will be right to have the windows fastened or locked, and the door of the chamber bolted without ; or to con- fine the ankle or wrist to the bed-post by a long fillet, which may by its detention awake the sleeper on starting from the bed.
IMITATIVE MONOMANIA.
' Men, wives, and children, stare, cry out, and run, As it were doomsday." JULIUS OESAK.
THERE are other very curious analogies of somnam- bulism, which are marked by a power of action that appears preternatural. And here again we witness the irresistibility of motion, which seems to subvert the laws of gravitation and the principles of mechanics. The involuntary twitchings and contortions of St. Vi- tw's dance present the slighter form of these eccentric actions, which, in the intense degree, become like the fury of a raving maniac.
In young girls there often is a proneness to be excited by slight causes, — to be startled by mere trifles.
Savarry tells us of a man who, at two o'clock each day, was irresistibly impelled to rap at doors and make very odd noises, and felt intense pleasure in doing this. If this had occurred in the night, it would have been termed somnambulism.
Gall also relates of a young man at Berlin, who, after rolling about in his bed for some time, and jumping out and in repeatedly in his sleep, at last started up awake, astonished at the crowd around his bed. And Dr.
330 IMITATIVE MONOMANIA.
Darwin writes of a boy, nine years old, who went through a course of gymnastics, with an occasional song between the acts. At length he seemed bursting, and soon sank down in a stupor.
ASTB. I have read, (I think in Mezeray,) of an epi- demic mania of this sort, in which the creatures tore off their clothes, and ran naked through the streets and churches, until they fell breathless on the ground. Some of them swelled even to bursting, unless they were bound down by cords. The disease was referred to the agency of demons, and treated by exorcisms ; they even tore their flesh to free themselves from then* pos- sessing devils. I have seen also a confident story of some nuns, who jumped so high during an hysteric ecstacy, that they were at length seen to fly ; in imita- tion, perhaps, of the Corybantes, the priests of Cybele, who, in the celebration of their mysteries, leaped and raved, like madmen in the midst of their shrieks and bowlings.
Ev. All these eccentricities amount to complete mo- nomania for the time they last, and they are marked often by a very violent imitative propensity ; like the delirium which came upon the Abderites, on witnessing the performance of the (( Andromeda" of Euripides, by Archelaiis. Of such nature was the (f dancing mania" of the middle ages ; the tarantula of Apulia, in which melancholy was succeeded by madness ; the feats of the Jumpers of Cornwall, and the Convulsionnaires of the Parisian miracles.
Yet with all this apparent violence, there might be a power of control by management. On some sudden and extreme mental influence, there was in the Maison de la Charite, at Haerlem, an infectious convulsion of this nature, so that the troop of little scholars, girls and boys, were a mere legion of dancing maniacs ; and nothing appeared to relieve them, until, a ruse of the
IMITATIVE MONOMANIA. 331
physician Boerhave put to flight the illusion. With a solemn voice he pronounced, in the hearing of the little creatures, his decision that each of them should be burned to the bone of the arm with a red hot iron. From that moment the mania subsided.
Dr. Hecker, in his account of the Dance of the middle ages, notices two forms of this national monomania : — " Tarantulism" and the " Danse de Saint Guy"
The first was marked by all sorts of illusions, demon- omania, obscene dancing, groaning, and falling down senseless.
The persons who believed themselves bitten by the tarantula became sad and stupid. The flute or guitar alone could give them succour. At the sound of its music they awoke, as if by enchantment ; then* eyes opened, their movements, which at first slowly followed the music, gradually became animated, until they merged into an impassioned dance. To interrupt the music was disastrous: — the patients relapsed into their stu- pidity, until they became exhausted by fatigue. During the attacks, several singular idiosyncracies were mani- fested, contrary to what occurred in Germany. Scarlet was a favourite colour, though some preferred green or yellow. A no less remarkable phenomenon was their ardent longing for the sea ; they implored to be carried to its shores, or to be surrounded by marine pictures ; some even threw themselves into the waves. But the dominant passion was for music, though they varied in their particular tastes. Some sought the braying sound of the trumpet, others the softer harmony of stringed instruments.
There was once a woman of Piedmont who was charmed by the " capriccio," played by the leader of an orchestra, into an ecstatic dance. In her, the sensa- tions, as she expressed them, were so " strangely min- gled," as powerfully to illustrate the fine line of distinc-
332 IMITATIVE MONOMANIA.
tion between pleasure and pain. She gradually be- came weaker, and the memory of the music was so intense, that, while she was irresistibly impelled to this maniacal dance, her expressions were those of acute pain, and her cries were constantly of those " horrid sounds." In six months, this unhappy creature died exhausted.
The Tigretier, of Abyssinia, is believed in Africa to be the effect of demoniac influence. Indeed there is in this strange state a complete metamorphosis of features, and voice, and manner. In the hearts, even of the women, the affections of nature and of attachment seem to be annihilated, and they seem overwhelmed by some oppressive weight, which is dissipated only by almost preternatural exertion, excited by the charm of music ; in which wild dance the female is dressed in ornaments of silver, like the chiefs of battle. This maniac move- ment is often, I believe, kept up from early morning until sunset, ere the accumulation of energy is ex- hausted; and even then the woman will start off sud- denly and outrun the fleetest hunter, until she drops as if dead. But it seems the climax of the cure is not complete, until she drops all her ornaments, and a matchlock is fired over her, when she owns her name and family, both having been previously denied. She is taken to the church and sprinkled with holy water, and then the spell is broken.
There is another strange monomania, an incitement to suicide, evinced in that loathsome disease of the Lombard and Venetian plains, Pellagra. The prevail- ing fashion is drowning ; so that Strambi has termed this monomania, water-madness.
Others are driven on by, still more horrible fancies. Thus Grenier wrapped himself in a wolf-skin, and mur- dered young maids that he might devour them. And, among ourselves, the desire to change the infant into a
IMITATIVE MONOMANIA. 333
cherub, has led the wild fanatic to the murder of the innocents !
ASTR. This, I suppose, is Lycantkropy, or wolf-mad- ness, on which old Burton so funnily expatiates ; and to which the author of the old play of " Lingua" also points, alluding to the
" Thousand vain imaginations, Making some think their heads as big as horses, Some that they're dead, some that they're turned to wolves."
In the woods of Limousin, in France, the belief in the power of changing from men to wolves is still pre- valent. The Loup-garoux, or Wehr-wolf, was thought to have been in league with Satan.
In my wanderings through Poictou, these monsters seemed to me to confine their unholy powers to mid- night prowling, and the wolf-howl. Yet Marie, in the "Lai du Bisclavaret" endows them with the cannibalism of the goul and the vampire :
" So Garwal roams in savage pride,
And hunts for blood, and feeds on men ; Spreads dire destruction, far and wide, And makes the forests broad his den."
Ev. The extraordinary effects of the instinct of imi- tation in spreading these epidemics, is but an example on the grand scale of what we see daily instances of in yawning, hiccoughing, coughing, and other similar acts, and in the propagation of hysteria and epilepsy. Some persons, again, possess an irresistible tendency to imi- tate others in mere trifling things. Tissot relates a case of a female, who never could avoid doing every thing she saw any one else do. She was obliged to walk blindfolded in the streets ; and, if you tied her hands, she experienced intolerable anguish until they were loosened. There was another girl, that was seen by
334 IMITATIVE MONOMANIA.
Dr. Horn, at Salzburg, who sat cross-legged, like a hog. She had been brought up in a sty.
Even during the Commonwealth, the religious fanati- cism of the Quakers carried the proselytes to such a pitch, that the preachers were thrown into excessive convulsions, and seemed possessed of demons. The churches were broken into, and the ministers insulted and attacked in the pulpits. Chains, and locks, and the pillory, which were inflicted on these mad people, failed, as it might be expected, in restoring their senses, although they bore them with the most astonishing for- titude. In their worshipping, the same eccentricities were seen : after a deep and long silence, a number of the devotees rose at once, and declaimed. The pre- sumptuous imitation of the Saviour was a favourite illusion ; and the forty-days' fast sometimes terminated in death. Naylor, convinced of his divine identity, rode in procession on a mule, while his deluded prose- lytes spread their garments, and sung Hosannas to him. Nay, the purity of the female mind was so grossly per- verted, that a Quakeress walked naked into a church, before Cromwell, as a sign to the people !
There was a letter in an " Aberdeen Herald," dated Invergordon, Sept. 9, 1840, from which I quote this story :
" I had the curiosity to go to the church of Roskeen, last night, to observe the workings of a revival. I was prepared for something extraordinary, but certainly not for what I saw. The sobs, groans, loud weeping, faint- ing, shrieking, mingled in the most wild and unearthly discordance with the harsh cracked voice of the clergy- man, who could only at intervals be heard above the general weeping and wailing. I was struck by the cries being all from young voices ; and on examining a little more closely, I found that the performers were almost wholly children — girls, vary ing from five to four-
6
IMITATIVE MONOMANIA. 335
teen years of age ; a few young women, perhaps a dozen, but not a single man or lad. I stood for nearly half an hour by three girls, the eldest about twelve years of age, who were in the most utter distress, each vying with the other in despairing cries. Their mother came to them, but made no exertion to check their bursts of — I don't know what to call it. In the churchyard there were lots of children in various stages of fainting. One poor girl seemed quite dead, and I insisted on one of the old crones, who was piously looking on, to go for some water, or to attempt something to give her re- lief, but was told, ' It was no' a case for water ; it was the Lord, and he would do as he liked with her. She was seeing something we didna see, and hearing some- thing we didna hear.' She was lying on the ground, supported by her father. Indeed the poor ignorant parents have been worked upon until they believe they are highly honoured by the Lord, by having such signs of the Spirit manifested in their families. The service, if it may be called so, was in Gaelic."
In the reign of the second George, Count Zinzendorf came from Germany and established the principles of the Hernhutters, or Moravians. These were debased by ceremonies, which they misnamed worship, of the most licentious character.
Like Mahomet, Zinzendorf proclaimed himself a pro- phet and a king, and in his presumption of an imme- diate appeal to, and answer from, the Saviour, in all matters of doubt, made a host of proselytes.
IDA. In our own day, another delirious profanation of the holy name of the Saviour has been exhibited, in the imitative monomania of Sir William Court enay (as he was called), in Kent. In May, 1838, this wild enthu- siast (whose beauty of feature and expression closely resembled the paintings of Christ by Guide and Carlo Dolce, and who, to heighten this resemblance, wore his
336 IMITATIVE MONOMANIA.
hair and beard in a peculiar form, and clothed himself in a robe) gained by his art numerous disciples in Kent, who implicitly believed his divine nature and mission. His career was, however, soon closed in a very awful and bloody tragedy — the death of himself, of many of his followers, and of the military who were called out to secure him. His disciples, to the last, not only believed in his divine nature, but even after his interment were watching in implicit belief of his approaching resur- rection !
The mania of the " unknown tongues" has almost equalled this delusion. If we presume to analyse, on the principles of philosophy or reason, those religious eccentricities, which seem, even in the mind of the fanatic, to spring from sincerity or conviction, they must yet, I suppose, be termed maniacal, and this without the slightest profanation of the Divine will. Evil, doubtless, is permitted for a wise purpose, and while we deplore its immediate effects, we must not hope to reveal its origin or its end.
At Brighton, some time ago, while at one of the Millennium chapels, the wife of Caird, who was then preaching, uttered a dismal howling of this unknown language, which paralysed some, and threw into con- vulsions many others of the congregation. A young French lady among them instantly was struck with maniacal despondency, and, after some infliction of self-torture, became delirious and died in a hospital.
We learn from Plutarch, that in Milesium there was once a prevalent fashion among the young girls to hang themselves; while the same mania once spread among the demoiselles of Lyons, to drown themselves in the Rhone. The Convulsionists of Paris, in 1724, not only inflicted self-torture, but in their wild delight solicited the bystanders to stone them.
The commission of a great or extraordinary crime to
IMITATIVE MONOMANIA. 337
this day produces, not unfrequently, a kind of mania of imitation in the district in which it happened. I have known incidents, falsely called religious, to occasion similar events ; and what is remarkable, the scene or place of the first event seemed to favour its repetition, by other persons approaching it. Thus a supposed miracle having been performed before the gate of the convent of St. Genevieve, such a number of similar oc- currences happened on the same spot in a few days, that the police was compelled to post a peremptory notice on the gate, prohibiting any individual from working miracles on the place in question. When the locality was thus shut up, the thaumaturgia ceased. It is not long since we witnessed in Paris two events of a similar character. About four years ago, at the Hotel des Invalides, a veteran hung himself on the threshold of one of the doors of a corridor. No suicide had oc- curred in the establishment for two years previously, but in the succeeding fortnight five invalids hung themselves on the same cross-bar, and the governor was obliged to shut up the passage. During the last days of the empire, again, an individual ascended the column in the Place Vendome, and threw himself down and was dashed to pieces. The event excited a great sensation ; and in the course of the ensuing week, four persons imi- tated the example, and the police were obliged to pro- scribe the entrance to the column. The same mania was almost induced by the suicide of a foolish girl, who leaped from the balcony of our own city column on Fish-street Hill. Indeed Monseigneur Mare, of Paris, alludes to a society enrolled for the mere purpose of suicide; and there was an annual ballot to decide which of these miserable creatures should be immolated as the suicide of the year ! !
Dr. Burrows, I remember also, relates cases analo- gous to these. They occurred in the ranks of some
z
338 IMITATIVE MONOMANIA.
army on the continent, in which there was an epidemic propensity to suicide, until the general began to hang the soldiers on trees as scarecrows. The mania, as you may believe, very soon subsided.
Ev. Your curiosities eclipse mine, Ida. But the natural leaning to the marvellous, will, without mania or fanaticism, by the mere sympathy of intercommunicat- ing minds, spread wide these illusions, even in the most simple instances. Some time since, a very large assem- blage were watching with intense interest the stone lion of the Percies, at Northumberland House. They were unanimous in the conviction that he was swinging his tail to and fro; a false impression, of course, which had gradually accumulated from this solitary exclama- tion of a passenger : " By heaven, he wags his tail !" Of this sort of illusion I was myself a witness. Beneath the western portico of St. Paul's, a crowd of gazers were bending their eyes on the image of the saint, who was nodding at them with a very gracious affability. Curio- sity had risen to the pitch of wonder at a miracle, when suddenly a sparrow-hawk flew from the ringlets of the saint, and the illusion vanished.
These eccentricities, you will perceive, occurred spon- taneously ; and it is a most interesting study to note the analogies between these diseased actions, and those re- sulting from the influence of certain gases and vegetable juices.
I have known the seeds of stramonium, when swal- lowed by children, produce a temporary delirium, and a state of chorea, singing, dancing, laughing, and other mad frolics, which could not be controlled. And in the " History of Virginia," by Beverly, it is recorded, that during the rebellion of Bacon, at James Town, some soldiers, after eating the young leaves of stramonium for spinach, enacted "a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several days. One
IMITATIVE MONOMANIA. 339
would blow up a feather into the air, another would dart straws at it with much fury, another, stark naked, was seen sitting up in a corner, like a monkey, grinning and making mouths." In this frantic condition they were confined for safety. In eleven days they recovered, but had no memory of the delirium. Such also is the effect of large quantities of black henbane. Dr. Patouillet, of Toucy, in France, in 1737 witnessed a mania of this sort in nine persons, who had eaten of that root. It was marked by the strangest actions and expressions. In these also there was no recollection of the illusion.
But the closest analogy, in point of concentrated energy, to eccentric somnambulism, is the effect of the inhalation of the " gaseous oxide of azote," or " prot- oxide of nitrogen," the laughing-gas. So intense is its impression on the nerves and blood of the brain, that it effects a perfect metempsychosis. This gas contains a greater relative proportion of oxygen than common air, and it is inhaled through a tube from a bladder or silk bag.. After a little giddiness and headache, the breather soon begins to feel a very delicious thrilling ; the eyes are dazzled by even common objects, so much are the senses excited. Pride and pugnacity are quickly de- veloped : we think ourselves grand seignors, and ele- vated far beyond the common class of mortals. We expect from all a salaam, and, with all the proud dignity of papacy, wonder that the people do not fall down and kiss our toe. We turn a deaf ear to all which is ad- dressed to us; in short, we are dissociated from all around us. Sir Humphrey Davy, as the effect was wearing off, seemed to have been charmed into the com- bined philosophy of Berkley and Hume. He writes, " with the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed: 'Nothing exists but thoughts; the uni- verse is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains/ "
340 IMITATIVE MONOMANIA.
This brilliancy is probably the effect of scarlet or highly oxygenized blood, acting on the brain and nerves of the senses.
The duration of this gaseous influence is usually from five minutes to a quarter of an hour. It is not, how- ever, always so transient.
From the record of Professor Silliman, it seems to have converted an fe II Penseroso" into a " L' Allegro." A man of melancholy became a man of mirth : and, although before his inhalation he had no sweet tooth in his head, he began to eat little except sugar and sweet cakes, and to swallow molasses with his meat and potatoes.
Although sparring is the grand amusement of the gas-breather, yet we can often decide on the shades of character, however studiously they may have been con- cealed from us in sane moments.
A gentleman among my fellow-students threw him- self forcibly on his back, by his attempts to spout Shakspere with dignity and effect.
Another threw himself prostrate in the snow, and rolling himself over and back across the quadrangle at Guy's, turned himself into an immense cylindrical snowball.
Another snapped his fingers in defiance, and walked with a most pompous strut, and without his hat, to the middle of London Bridge, ere he was brought to his senses.
Indeed these experiments seem so replete with the ludicrous, that I wonder Cruikshank and Hood have not often caught a fact, as a theme for their brilliant fancy.
REVERIE.
" That fools should be so deep-contemplative."
" In his brain
He hath strange places cramm'd With observation, the which he vents In mangled forms." As Yon LIKE IT.
ASTR. I was dreaming last night, Evelyn, of your eccentric puppets ; and I cannot but wonder at the contrasted influences of nitrous oxide on the brain and marrow, as you say. In one, we see the wondrous phenomena of somnambulism ; in the other, a state of apathy, like the almost senseless reverie of the idiot.
Ev. You are shrewd, Astrophel, and have hit on these objective analogies with the acuteness of a patho- logist. Contrasts they truly are ; and yet there is a natural transition from one to the other.
Somnambulism is the most eccentric condition of sleep ; and Reverie is that state which constitutes the nearest approximation to slumber. But the French verb, rever, is a comprehensive word, signifying all the eccentricities of mind, from idiocy to divine philosophy ; so that its derivative, " Reverie/' may be construed into Dream, Delirium, Raving, Thought, Fancy, Meditation, Abstraction.
You may wonder at this combination, but, however
342 ABSTRACTION OF IDIOCY.
you may smile, the existence of every one is marked by a certain degree of moral or instinctive mania, modified by the peculiarity of habit, taste, or sentiment ; and, I may add, of intellectual monomania (" monomanie rai- sonnante"), in reference to some particular subject. There may indeed be an incubation of madness ; and, if circumstances occur to sit and hatch, the germs will be developed. When these two, moral and intellectual error (which may separately pass current in the world for eccentricity), unite, then the man is mad, and be- comes an irresponsible agent.
The term " Reverie/' then, will imply the varied con- ditions of that faculty, which phrenology terms concen- trativeness ; the extremes of which mark the idiot and the sage.
Idiocy is the most abject and imperfect condition of the waking mind, resembling closely the first disposi- tion to slumber, the sensation of doziness. The crea- ture will commit the most absurd acts, and utter the most ridiculous or profane expressions, without the re- deeming apology of being engaged in abstract thought or abstruse calculation.
It is consolatory, however, to know that this weak- ness is usually connate, or manifested at the very dawn of intellect; so that we have not the painful study of contrasting, in one being, the light of mind with its shadowy darkness.
The idiot, indeed, often appears so little more than a laughing or a dancing vegetable, that pity yields to curiosity and mirth ; and, instead of mourning, we work into the plot and incidents of a novel or a stage farce, either that strange mixture of weakness and cunning which is delineated in Davie Gellatly, or the absolute imbecility of Audrey, Slender, and Sir Andrew Ague- cheek.
But this melancholy being is not always a solitary
ABSTRACTION OF IDIOCY. 343
curiosity. In many districts, especially in the stream- fed valleys of Europe and Asia, nature fails, by whole- sale, in the development of that " paragon of animals," man.
Such are the Capots, or Cretins, of Chinese Tartary, as we learn from Sir George Staunton ; those of the Rhone and Tyrolese valleys ; the Coliberts of Rochelle ; the Cagneux of Brittany; the Gaffos of Navarre; the Gavachos of Spain ; and the Gezitani of the Pyrenees.
The condition of the lowest class of these wretched beings is indeed that of idiocy ; their intellectual power being little more than the mental blank which would mark the acephalous, or brainless monsters, could such abortions attain the age of maturity. It is mere animal life, with the very faintest stamp of intelligence.
The Cretin is from four to five feet high, cadaverous, flabby, the head immensely out of proportion, the skin studded with livid eruptions, the eyes blear and squint- ing, the lips slavering, the limbs weak and crooked ; and (like the Stulbings of Swift) the senses are imperfect, the hearing and speech often absolutely lost, — the ex- pression being that of a fool or a satyr. And dissection demonstrates the frequent causes of all this ; for, in the skull of these beings, we often find a bluish jelly, instead of healthy brain. This diseased pulp is thus the source of both animal and intellectual apathy. The idiot will often seem insensible to pain, while his flesh is burning ; and objects or subjects do not cause sufficient impres- sion on this pulpy brain to produce their image, so that the being may almost live without a sense.
CAST. This is a dreary, but, I suppose, a faithful picture, and shows us one of those impressive con- trasts which nature is fraught with. The Cretin dwarf amidst the gigantic sublimity of the Alps; the lava stream rolling over the chesnut groves of Valombrosa ; the malaria that steams up from the Pontine even to
344 . WANDERING.
Albano ; the murky sulphur cloud that floats over Avernus, and the Solfaterra; and the poison-snake creeping among the honied flowers and purple festoons which gild the prairies and interlace the forests of Columbia, show us how intimately are blended the lights and shadows of creation. Yet Evelyn will let me ask him if there are not many beautiful stories, which we may have deemed the creation of poesy, proving that idiotism is not always definite and permanent. I ought to blush while I recite them. The romance of Cymon and Iphigenia is not a mere fable. I have heard a story of a youth who was an idiot to his ] 7th year. At this time he saw a beautiful girl, and in- stantly felt deep and devoted love for her ; and became, from this almost divine influence, as acute in intellect as his playmates.
ASTR. And what writeth the quaint Anatomist of Melancholy ? — " We read in the lives of the Fathers a story of a child that was brought up in the wilderness from his infancy by an old hermite. Now come to man's estate, he saw by chance two comely women wandering in the woods. He asked the old man what creatures they were. He told him fayries. After a while talking obiter, the hermite demanded of him which was the pleasantest sight that he ever saw in his life ? He rea- dily replied, the two fayries he espied in the wilderness. So that without doubt there is some secret loadstone in a beautiful woman, a magnetique power."
IDA. We do not hold your gallantry lightly, Astro- phel ; there is some hope of your conversion.
Ev. That mind is termed weak, where there is a want of the power of fixing the attention to one object, a wandering of the imaginative faculty. A train of ideas arises, between the links of which there is some remote relation ; but its beginning and end may appear so dis- sonant, that the absent person will fail to recognize the
WANDERING. 345
connexion, until, by an effort to retrace the steps of thought, the mystery is developed.
IDA. The subjects of this form of reverie are, I pre- sume, the wool-gatherers of society, being " every thin-r by turns, and nothing long ;" and often, like the dog in the fable, losing the substance while they grasp at the shadow ; others employ their time by sitting
" Musing all alone, Building castles in the air,"
forming plans and projecting schemes which shall fill men's minds with wonder, and their own pockets with gold.
But these castle-builders are, alas ! but the dupes of their own mad fancy. The card-house is nearly finished, and one imprudent touch of the child topples it down headlong. One of the most salutary lessons on this foible is the fable of the Persian visionary, the glassman Alnaschar, who, by rehearsing one kick of the foot, that was to indicate his despotic will, broke into ten thousand pieces the basket of merchandize, which, by its accumulating profits, was to raise him to the highest dignities. Such are the results of self-glamourie or castle-building.
Ev. It is a moral lesson of great worth, dear Ida. But these wanderings are often assimilating the true delirium of fever, of which the dreams of Piranesi are examples. In his sketches of these illusions he figures himself as ascending by steps so high that he at length vanishes into the clouds.
Now there are many curious instances of forgetful- ness, as there may be a confusion of ideas from this deficiency of concentration, memory being, as it were, deranged. From study, or intense thought, a jumble of strange ideas will sometimes force themselves in-
346 ILLUSIVE ABSTRACTION.
voluntarily on the mind, displacing or confusing the subject of meditation.
Thus a German, of the name of Spalding, of high at- tainments, informs us, that after great mental labour, he was intending to write this receipt : " fifty dollars, being one half-year's rate/' but quite unconsciously concluded it thus : " fifty dollars through the salvation of Bra." And the author of the " Spiritual Treasury," Mason, during his devotion to its composition, had, as he be- lieved, taken the address of a visitor on whom he was to wait ; but on referring to his note, he read, not the address, but — " Acts ii. verse 8."
Children have naturally a want of power of con- centration. I have told you that if a new or more attractive object strikes their sight, they will drop that which they were holding ; and Foote would often, while taking a pinch, let his snuff-box fall from his hand, if for a moment his attention was diverted.
ASTR. The reverse of wandering, then, you term concentrativeness. You would not stigmatize the pas- sive or involuntary form of abstraction, as the reverie of a monomaniac.
Ev. Noi As attention is concentration of a sense, ab- straction is the concentration or attention of the mind ; therefore the power of fixing the senses and forgetting the mind, is attention, that of fixing the mind and forget- ting the senses, is abstraction — philosophy, if you will.
The active form, the power of fixing the attention on one subject, or of separating ideas and bringing them into association on one point, is the great characteristic of the philosopher and the mathematician. That inat- tention to minutia during this abstraction, has, I grant, caused the shafts of satire to be profusely flung at many a "learned pundit;" for the jokes of Rabelais are eclipsed by the eccentricities of our sages : Dominie Sampson is no caricature.
ILLUSIVE ABSTRACTION. 347
As I trace these forms of reverie from monomania to its curious contrast, the folie raisonnante of men of one idea, (in which there is an aberration of intellect, or want of consciousness on all subjects but one,) and so on to philosophical abstraction, we shall learn, not without some humility, how close an alliance does really exist between great wits and madness.
The records of history and fiction teem with the illu- sions of the monomaniacs from intense impression. The madness of Ophelia and of Lear, are true and faithful illustrations of the effects of brooding over sor- row. In the monarch, indeed, that one momentary glimpse of reason when the word "king" like an electric shock falls on his ear, and, for an instant, lights up his intellect, which as suddenly darkness again overshadows, beautifully shows forth by contrast this madness of one idea.
Dr. Gooch relates the case of a lady, who in conse- quence of an alarm of fire, believed that she was the Virgin Mary, and that her head was constantly en- circled by a brilliant halo or glory.
A gentleman, on narrowly escaping from the earth- quake at Lisbon, fell into a state of delirium when- ever the word "earthquake" was pronounced in his hearing.
In "Pechlin" we read of a lady, who gazed with painless interest on the comet of 1681 until she ob- served it through a telescope of high power ; the terror was so intense, that she was frightened to death even in a few days.
Dr. Morrison relates the case of an insane gentleman who had consulted a gypsy, and was instantly in a state of high excitement, whenever a subject associated with her prophecies was alluded to.
My friend, Dr. Uwins, informed me of an intellectual young gentleman, who from some morbid association
348 ILLUSIVE ABSTRACTION.
with the idea of an elephant, was struck by an horrific spasm whenever the word was named, or even written before him ; and to such a pitch was this infatuation carried, that elephant paper, if he were sensible it were such, produced the same effect.
The Reverend John Mason, of Water Stratford, evinced in every thing sound judgment, except that he believed that he was Elias, and foretold the advent of Christ, who was to commence the millennium at Strat- ford.
Dr. Abercrombie writes of a young botanist who had gained a prize: he thought he was in a boat sailing to Greenwich on a botanical excursion, and conversed rationally on all points but that of the prize, which he asserted another student had gained.
Hear, too, another rhapsody of the " Opium-Eater." After a close and intense study of the works of Livy, the wrords Consul Romanus seemed to haunt his mind. "At a clapping of hands would be heard the heart- rending sounds of ( Consul Romanus ;' and immediately came sweeping by in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus Marius girt round by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos of the Roman legions."
There is a story (written in the seventeenth century) of a youth, who in a playful frolic put a ring on the marriage finger of a marble Venus ; and a strange illu- sion came upon him that she had thus become his wife, and, in obedience to the injunctions of the ceremony, came to his bed when the sable canopy of night was spread around them. So intense was this illusion, and so cold and loveless was his heart withal, that, as the story goes, an exorcist was employed to dissolve the spell which had so firmly bound him.
IDA. I believe it was Mrs. Barry, who (as we read in the " Last Essays of Elia,") averred that when playing
ILLUSIVE ABSTRACTION. 349
the child of Isabella, she felt the burning tears of Mrs. Porter fall on her neck, as she was breathing o'er her some pathetic sentence. Even the study of Lady Mac- beth, in midnight solitude, so intensely excited tin- imagination of Mrs. Siddons, that Campbell says, as she was disrobing herself in her chamber, she trembled with affright, even at the rustling of her own silk attire.
Ev. I could add many stories to yours, Ida. This sensibility, if protracted or in excess, becomes the Pano- phobia of Esquirol. He attended once a lady whom the slightest noise alarmed, and who was wont to scream with affright at the simple moving of herself in bed.
From the journal of Esquirol I will quote other frag- ments, in which we see that every object was associated with one image.
" During our promenade he (a gallant general) inter- rupted me several times, in the midst of a very con- nected conversation, saying, "Do you hear how they repeat the words ' coward, jealous T &c. This illusion was produced by the noise of the leaves and the whist- ling of the wind among the branches of the trees, which appeared to him well-articulated sounds; and, although I had each time combated it with success, the illusion returned whenever the wind agitated the trees anew."
" A young married man was in a state of fury when- ever he saw a woman leaning on a man's arm, being convinced that it was his own wife. I took him to the theatre at the commencement of his convalescence, but as soon as a lady entered the saloon accompanied by a gentleman, he became agitated, and called out eagerly several times, ' That is she, that is she.' I could hardly help laughing, and we were obliged to retire.
" A lady, twenty-three years of age, afflicted with hys- terical madness, used to remain constantly at the windows of her apartment during the summer. When she saw a
350
ILLUSIVE ABSTRACTION.
beautiful cloud in the sky, she screamed out ' Garnerin, Garnerin, come and take me !' and repeated the same invitation until the cloud disappeared. She mistook the clouds for balloons sent up by Garnerin."
CAST. There is here as much romance, as when Ajax mistook a drove of oxen for the armed Greeks, or Don Quixote the windmills for a band of Spanish giants.
Ev. Again, Dr. Beddoes relates the case of a scholar, who locked himself up to study the Revelation. The confinement brought on dyspeptic pains and spasms, and he was persuaded that "the monster blasphemy, with ten heads, was preying on his vitals."
The Reverend Simon Brown died with the conviction that his rational soul was annihilated by a special fiat of the Divine will ; and a patient in the Friends' " Retreat," at York, thought he had no soul, heart, or lungs.
From " Tulpius" we learn, that the wife of Salomon Galmus sank into a state of extreme melancholy, from the deep conviction that she was a visitant from the tomb, but sent back to the world without her heart, for God had detained that in heaven.
Such illusions are sometimes excited by wounds of the brain. A soldier of the field of Austerlitz was struck with a delirious conviction that he was but an ill-made model of his former self. " You ask how Pere Lambert is," (he would say ;) " he is dead, killed at Austerlitz ; that you now see is a mere machine, made in his likeness." He would then often lapse into a state of catalepsy insensible to every stimulus.
Dr. Mead tells us of an Oxford student, who ordered the passing bell to be rung for him, and went himself to the belfry to instruct the ringers. He returned to his bed only to die.
A Bourbon prince thought himself dead, and refused to eat until his friends invited him to dine with Turenne and other French heroes long since departed.
ILLUSIVE ABSTRACTION.
There was a tradesman who thought he was a seven- shilling piece, and advertised himself thus: "If my wife presents me for payment, don't change me." Ac- cuse me not of transatlantic plagiarism.
Bishop Warburton tells us of a man who thought himself a goose pie; and Dr. Ferriday, of Manchester, had a patient who thought he had sivullowed the devil.
So indeed thought Luther. As in Hudibras,
" Did not the devil appear to Martin Luther in Germany for certain 1"
In Paris there lived a man who thought he had with others been guillotined, and when Napoleon was em- peror, their heads were all restored, but in the scramble he got the wrong one.
And there is the (t Visitor of Phantaste" in the old play of " Lingua," who exclaims : " No marvel, for when I beheld my fingers, I saw they were as trans- parent as glass."
You perceive that the illusions of Pope's " Rape of the Lock" are not all fictions : the maids who fancied they were turned into bottles, were not more in error than these philosophers with their maladie imaginaire.
CAST. Is there not wisdom, Evelyn, in nursing some of these innocent illusions ? I remember Kotzebue, in his " Journey to Paris," relates the following anecdote of a young girl, romantically in love. Her lover had often accompanied her on the harp : he died, and his harp had remained in her room. After the first excess of her despair, she sunk into the deepest melancholy, and much time elapsed ere she would sit down to her instrument. At last she did so, gave some touches, and, hark ! the harp, tuned alike, resounded in echo. The good girl was at first seized with a secret shudder- ing, but soon felt a kind of soft melancholy : she was firmly persuaded that the spirit of her lover was softly
352 ILLUSIVE ABSTRACTION.
sweeping the strings of the instrument. The harpsi- chord, from this moment, constituted her only pleasure, as it afforded her the certainty that her lover was still hovering near her. One of those unfeeling men, who want to know and clear up every thing, once entered her apartment. The girl instantly begged him to be quiet, for at that very moment the dear harp spoke most distinctly. Being informed of the amiable illusion which overcame her reason, he laughed, and, with a great display of learning, proved to her by experimental physics, that all this was very natural. From that in- stant the maiden grew melancholy, drooped, and soon after died.
Ev. Truth is not always to be spoken, nor too much energy exerted, in our treatment ; for many a mad act, as it will be called, is resorted to, as a relief.
Tirouane de Mericourt was wont to saturate her bed- clothes with cold water, then lie down on it. Although an extreme remedy, it might yield her relief from burn- ing pains. In the darker ages, she would have been chained and scourged.
But from Marcus Donatus we read the following case of still more melancholy interest ; another illustra- tion of your question, dear Castaly :
" Vicentinus believed himself too large to pass one of his doonvays. To dispel this illusion, it was resolved by his physician that he should be dragged through this aperture by force. This erroneous dictate was obeyed ; but, as he was forced along, Vicentinus screamed out in agony, that his limbs were fractured, and the flesh torn from his bones. In this dreadful delusion, with terrific imprecations against his murderers, he died."
ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
" I love to cope him iu these sullen fits, For then he's full of matter."
As You LIKE IT.
ASTR. So that in these cases it is one faculty only which is interrupted, and not the combined intellect. But all the faculties but one may be deranged, may they not?
Ev. Yes. When the patient is insane on all points but one, we term it, " Folie raisonnante."
The very idiot, indeed, is often fond of most exact arrangement. The savage of Aveyron instantly put things in order when they were deranged.
White, in his " History of Selborne," records the propensities of an idiot, who, he says, was a very Merops-apiaster, or Bee-bird. Honey-bees, humble- bees, and wasps, were his prey : he would seize them, disarm them of their weapons, and suck their bodies for the sake of their honey-bags. Except in this adroitness, he had no understanding.
Pinel states the case of a mechanical genius, who became insane, believing his head to be changed. Yet he invented mechanism of the most intricate combina-
A a
354 ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
tions. We are informed, too, of a clergyman, who was ever insane, but when delivering his discourses from the pulpit.
I believe some parts of a national establishment were constructed from the plans of one of its inmates, who was to all other intents and purposes a mad- man.
Dr. Uwins once told me, that some of the lines in his biographical work were written by a maniac in the Hoxton Asylum, who was ever aware of the approach of his mania. These lines were thought to be among the best in the work.
Nay, idiots will sometimes reason, and work out a syllogism. I think Dr. Conolly relates a story of two, who quarrelled, because each asserted that he was the Holy Ghost ; at length, one decided that the other was the Holy Ghost, and that he could not be, because there were not two.
From this " folie raisonnante " there is an easy tran- sition to that eccentricity which seems to be a set-off against the strength of mind of the deep thinker. The permanent derangement, however, we term insanity ; the transient, eccentricity.
Marullus informs us that Bernard rode all day long by the Lemnian Lake, and at last inquired where he was. Archimedes rushed into the street naked from the bath, in an ecstacy at having discovered the alloy in the crown of Syracuse. Pinel tells us of a priest, who, in an abstract mood, felt no pain, although part of his body was burning.
" Viote," says Zimmerman, " during his fits of mathematical abstraction, would often remain sleepless and foodless for three days and nights."
And Plato thus records an instance of the abstraction of Socrates : — " One morning he fell into one of these raptures of contemplation, and continued standing in
ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT. 355
the same posture till about noon. In the evening, some Ionian soldiers went out, and, wrapping themselves up warm, lay down by him in the open field, to observe if he would continue in that posture all night ; which he did until the morning, and as soon as the sun rose he saluted it, and retired." This is mental abstraction with a vengeance !
ASTR. I will laugh with you at these oddities, Evelyn ; yet not a whit less ludicrous are some of the vagaries of the learned Thebans of modern times. The abstractions of Newton were proverbial. It may not be true, that he once inserted the little finger of a lady, whose hand he was holding, into his pipe, instead of a tobacco- stopper; or that he made a small hole in his study- door for the exit of a kitten, by the side of a large one for the cat: it is certain, however, that he was once musing by his fire, with his knees close to the bars, when, finding his legs in danger of being grilled, he rang his bell, and, in a rage, desired his servant to take away the grate.
Dr. Hamilton, author of the acute "Essay on the National Debt/' visited his college class in the morning with his own black silk stocking on one leg, and his wife's white cotton on the other ; and would sometimes occupy the whole class time by repeatedly removing the stu- dents' hats from his table, which they as often placed there. He would run against a cow, and beg madam's pardon, hoping he had not hurt her ; and he would bow politely to his wife in the street, without recognition. Yet with all this he would, at any time, directly converse on a scientific subject beautifully and elo- quently.
Bacon, the sculptor, in a rich full dress was finishing Howard's statue in St. Paul's, and, being cold, .put on a ragged green and red shag waistcoat. In this trim he walked out to call on some ladies in Doctors'
356 ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
Commons. On his return he told his son that they were sadly disposed to laugh about nothing. On being convinced, however, of his condition, he remembered the people he passed also giggled, and cried out, " He does it for a wager."
Hogarth paid a visit, in his new carriage, to the Lord Mayor, and, after his audience, walked home in his state clothes, leaving his carriage at a private door of the Mansion-House.
Dr. Harvest, of Ditton, a very learned man, would unconsciously allow his horse to be loosened from his grasp, and walk home with the bridle on his arm. He would walk into his church on Sunday, with his fowling- piece. He would write a letter, address it, and send it to three different persons. He lost a lady, the daughter of a bishop, as his wife, by going out to catch gudgeons, forgetting that it was the morning of his marriage cere- mony ; and he once threw a glass of wine at backgammon, and swallowed the dice !
After this we can no longer call caricatures the ab- stract philosopher who boiled his watch, and held the egg in his hand as the time-keeper ; or the American, who put his candle to bed, and blew himself out ; or the lady, who believed herself to be a post-letter, but waited patiently until the letter-sorter had examined her, to ascertain if she was single or double.
Ev. There is some hope of you now, dear Astrophel, for you are returning to matters of fact.
From the deep interest of dramatic scenes may spring the same apathy as that which you have illustrated. Dr. Fordyce writes of one who forgot he was sitting on a hard bench, when Garrick brought in his dead Cordelia in his arms. And even the impression of fatigue and pain will often, for a time, leave us, when we are gazing on architectural or picturesque beauty.
IDA. Are not those minds which are easily influenced
ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT. 357
by morbid sensibility, the minutiae of existence, often thus depressed into a condition somewhat resembling the moroseness of these half-idiots ?
Ev. Ay, even the mighty minds of heroes and of monarchs. Queen Elizabeth was often wont to sit alone, in the dark, in sorrow and in tears. We know not if the fate of Essex or of Mary were the cause, but the marble mind of Elizabeth was dissolved before she died. In Sully^s " Memoires," also, we read that the solitude of Charles IX., of France, was saddened by remorse, for his memory was ever pealing in his ear the shrieks and groans of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. During this influence we may often find that the fea- tures or actions are so deeply expressive as to prove an involuntary, though correct, index of the thought. According to the passions or subjects which occupy the mind, will be the play of feature or the_movement of the body.
" We might almost suppose the body thought."
This "brown study" is the slightest form of that state which the French term ennui, in which the mind too often is left to prey upon itself, having, as it were, no sympathy with the world. Its more severe symptoms are those of misanthropy, melancholy, and hypochondriasis, inducing but too often that extreme tedium vita, the climax of which is suicide. Out of the first, which is but the mere ripple of derangement, we may be laughed or coaxed ; nay, it may yield to the positive suffering of the body. The second is like the deep still water, the awful calmness antecedent to a tempest. In the words of Lord Erskine, " Reason is not driven from her seat, but distraction sits down on it along with her, holds her trembling on it, and frights her from her propriety. And then comes often o'er the mind
358 ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
a very coward sentiment, echoing the demoniac resolu- tion of Spenser's " Cave of Despair :"
" What if some little payne the passage have, That makes frayle flesh to fear the better ware ! Is not short payne well borne, that brings long ease, And layes the soule to sleep in quiet grave !"
IDA. Despair will often rouse even the most sensitive beings to the most patient fortitude. How is this ?
Ev. Not rouse, but depress — not fortitude, but apathy. I could excite your deepest sympathy and wonder, Ida,
by the history of the young and beautiful Ann G n,
who was hung for child-murder ; in whom the convulsive agony which followed her sentence at length ended in a resignation which some would term heroism. During the nights in which I myself watched her slumbers, both from deep scientific interest, and the request of her judges, her actions were automatic ; her existence was one perfect trance ; and she met her fate as if life and its consciousness had long been parted.
Even an intense blow will sometimes, as it were, annihilate sensibility, creating an icy apathy to all sub- sequent inflictions ; which was the effect on Mandrin, during the tortures of the wheel ; for he smiled at the third blow, to find that it hurt him so little.
IDA. Then we are to contrast the state of the un- happy girl with the voluntary endurance of heroism depending on the power of concentrating mind ? The almost superhuman endurance of pain is finely dis- played among the North American Indians, who even chant their own death-song calmly amidst worse than the tortures of the Inquisition, or sustain with a smile those probationary trials for the dignities of a chief, or the admission to the class of warriors, that are modelled with all the refinement of cruelty. On the banks of the Orinoco, especially, (if Robertson be right, or Gumilla,
ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT. 359
his authority, to be believed,) the ordeal begins by a rigid fast, reductive of the body's energy ; then com- mences a flaying of his body by lashes as dreadful as the knout, by the hands of the assembled chiefs, and then, if the slightest sensibility be evinced, he is dis- graced for ever. His raw and reeking flesh is then ex- posed to the stings and venom of insects and reptiles, and again suspended over the scorching and suffocating flames of herbs of the most disgusting odour ; and, to close this tale of torture, it is not seldom that the victim sinks in mortal agonies beneath the dreadful ordeal.
Ev. The two great springs of voluntary endurance of pain are religion and honour. Thus, among other heroic acts of England's martyrs, Cranmer held the apostate hand which signed his recantation in the midst of the flames until it was wasted. And the unyielding for- titude with which the victim bore the rack and other excruciating tortures of the popish Inquisition is almost beyond belief.
The fanaticism of the wild enthusiasts of the east it were profanation to call religion ; but with the hope of rejoining her husband in the realms of bliss, the Hindoo widow clasps his corpse in her arms, and, without a sigh, sets the torch to his funeral pile. And, to inherit the paradise of Brahma, the Fakir or Yoghee keeps his fist clenched for years, until the nails grow through his hand ; or forces the hooks between his ribs, and whirls himself aloft until he expires, or throws himself pros- trate beneath the crushing wheels of Juggernaut.
It is written that Cardan rendered himself by great efforts insensible to external irritants.
And analogous to this, was the almost superhuman
effort of that determined action of Muley Moloch
quoted in the " Spectator," from Vertot's " Revolutions
of Portugal :" — " In a condition of extreme prostration
6
360 ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
he was borne in a litter with his army. On the sound- ing of a retreat, although in a half-dying state, he leaped from the litter, and led his quailing troops to a charge, which ended in victory. Ere this was accomplished his life was fast ebbing, and, reclining on his litter, and en- joining the secrecy of his staff, with his finger on his lip, he died."
But my analysis will be incomplete, if I do not revert to a point that I had almost forgotten. These abstract moods have often been confounded with the visions of slumber, being adduced as proofs of the perfection of mind during sleep.
You reminded me, Astrophel, of the brilliant parody composed by Mackenzie, of the versification of Voltaire and La Fontaine, of the solution of the difficult prob- lem by Condorcet, of the discussion of abstruse points of policy by Cabanis. You might have added Condillac, who asserts that when he was composing the " Cours d'Etudes" he often left a chapter unfinished, but had it all in his mind when he awoke. And Franklin assures us, that he often dreamed of the issue of important events in which he was engaged, believing the vision to be the influence of inspired prophecy. Dr. Haycock, of Oxford, too, is said to have composed and preached sermons in his sleep, in despite even of bufferings.
These are not dreams, but the reveries of philosophers and poets. The faculties of perception are suspended : one only object occupies the mind, and the impression on the memory is vivid and permanent. Of this reverie I do not recollect a more interesting illustration than the " Dream of Tartini," and its exquisite product, " La Sonata di Diavolo." This admirable violinist and once esteemed composer, relates the following anecdote as the origin of his chef-d'ceuvre, the "Devil's Sonata." "One night, it was in the year 1713, I dreamed that I had made over my soul to his satanic majesty. Every
ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT. 361
thing was done to my wink ; the faithful menial antici- pated my fondest wishes. Among other freaks, it came into my head to put the violin into his hands, for I was anxious to see whether he was capable of producing anything worth hearing upon it. Conceive my astonish- ment at his playing a sonata, with such dexterity and grace, as to surpass whatever the imagination can con- ceive. I was so much delighted, enraptured, and en- tranced by his performance, that I was unable to fetch another breath, and, in this state, I awoke. I jumped up and seized upon my instrument, in the hope of re- producing a portion, at least, of the unearthly harmonies I had heard in my dream. But all in vain : the music which I composed under the inspiration, I must admit the best I have ever written, and of right I have called it the f Devil's Sonata ;' but the falling off between that piece and the sonata which had laid such fast hold of my imagination is so immense, that I would rather have broken my violin into a thousand fragments, and re- nounced music for good and all, than, had it been pos- sible, have been robbed of the enjoyment which the remembrance afforded me."
In the cases of precocious children, who are said to have "lisp'd in numbers," I do not doubt that the secret may be referred to this concentration of genius. Mozart composed a sonata at the age of four. The precocious little girl, Louisa Vinning, who was called the " Infant Sappho" has yet eclipsed Mozart in this ; that at the age of two years and eight months she sang repeatedly a melody perfectly new, and so perfect, that it was written down from her lips, and entitled, " The Infant's Dream." During all this, the little creature was in such a state of apparent abstraction, that it was believed by all around her that she walked and talked in her sleep.
These mental concentrations can, by some enthu-
362 ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
siasts, be produced at pleasure. The paroxysm of the improvisatore, for instance. But it is an effort which, like the dark hour of the Caledonian seer, is not en- dured with impunity: it points, indeed, emphatically to the limit beyond which mind should not be strained.
The Marquis de Moschati expressed himself to us, as experiencing excitement like intoxication when he sat himself to compose, and threw his whole soul into his subject. It commenced with irregular and laborious breathing, excessive palpitations, vertigo, tinnitus aurium, — the perception of objects being lost. Then came romantic fancies, like the visions of opium, " thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." At the conclusion was felt excessive exhaustion, and a state of mild cata- lepsy ensued for five or six days together. This ex- cited talent, therefore, is an evanescent madness.
CAST. Another fling at poesy. Were I an improvi- satrice, you would not so libel my inspiration. " Listen, lords and lady gay." In the summer of 18 — , after the Eisteddfod at Cardiff, we wandered over the hills to Caerphilly, the gigantic towers of Owain Glyndwr.
As I lay under the celebrated Hanging Tower, which is projecting eleven feet beyond its base, I reflected on the strange circumstance of the arrest of so gigantic a mass in its progress to prostration. "What," I ex- claimed, " is the power by which it is suspended ?" My imagination heightened my reverie, and placed be- fore me the image of the Destroyer, with his emblematic scythe and glass, and he answered me thus : —
M Half-dreaming mortal, listen ! It is /, Time, the destroyer, whose gigantic arm Lifted this pond'rous ruin from its base. Why hangs it thus, arrested in its course, In bold defiance of attraction's law ? Why, like its once proud lord, renown'd Glyndwr, Sinks not its mouldering grandeur to the ground ? Behold an emblem of vitality !
ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT. 363
A type of mortal man, of thee, of all ! Like this grey wall, thy tott'ring steps arc staid, And on a thread thy fragile life is hun^ ; Yet leaning, ever leaning, to the grave. One moment more, an atom of an age, This mould'ring ruin, trembling on its base, May, like the marble shafts of lone Palmyra, Be hurl'd to earth, and crumble into dust; And, like the ruin, thou !"
And yet / was not mad.
Ev. I talk not of a gentle heart like yours, fair Cas- taly ; but of that extreme, when ideas are received by a mind nearly exhausted, and lie for a while dormant. As sleep and fatigue wear off, and consciousness returns, these images are suddenly and brilliantly lighted up. If intense impression shall have been made on the heart or mind, intense will be the abstraction of the enthu- siast. Until one thought is touched, the patient is sane; but, when the chord vibrates, then, as in the pathetic episode of Sterne's Maria, the paroxysm is ex- pended in a flood of tears, or in a mad fit, or in a gush of wildest music.
To the latter cause, we owe many beauties of compo- sition. Demarini, the Italian tragedian, acted a prison- scene before Paganini, in which, with the pathos of deep distress, the victim prayed for death. The maestro re- tired to bed, but not to sleep ; his excited brain relieved its painful sympathies by the composition of the " Ada- gio apassionato"
Carl Maria Von Weber witnessed the waltzing of his wife with a gallant cavalier. He retired in a mood of jealous frenzy, and expressed the ideas which rankled in his heart by the " Invitation a la Walse"
ASTB. Well, is there not something special in all this?
Ev. Yes, truly, — a power imparted to some, withheld from others, — genius.
364 ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
ASTR. Yet, in explanation of this abstract reverie, the phrenologist will, I dare say, satisfy himself by merely deciding that the organ of concentrativeness is strongly developed.
Ev. It is clear, at least, that the deep interest of the subject of reflection overbalances the influence of the external senses. The impression of objects is either too slight, or rapid, to produce perception, or (in other words), however the impression may be imparted to the brain by the nerve, the brain is not sensible of it, and there is therefore no perception.
So intense indeed has been this influence, that Pliny contemplated the volcanic philosophy amidst the ashy cloud of Vesuvius by which he was destroyed. And Archimedes was so intent in solving a problem, during the siege of Syracuse, that no sense of danger impelled him to avoid the storm, or fly from the dagger of the assassin.
While Parmegiano was painting at Rome the " Vision of St. Jerome," which now adorns the National Gallery of England, the famous siege of that city was concluded by its spoliation. Yet Parmegiano (absorbed with his painting) was unconscious of the tumult, until his studio was burst open by some of the soldiers of the enemy. A similar story is told, also, of Protogenes, when Deme- trius was laying siege to Rhodes.
CAST. The flappers of Laputa would soon have dis- pelled this reverie.
Ev. But if they had thus flourished their official bladders, perhaps the "Principia Mathematica" had not been written ; for Newton explained the extent of his discoveries by his " always thinking unto them."
Somewhat like the effect of intense study on the mind, the muscles of the limbs will be influenced by one long-directed habit. Paganini was observed, on board a steam-boat, constantly to repose on the sofa. During
ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT. 365
this state of reverie, his left arm assumed the peculiar attitude in which he held his violin, until he saw that he was noticed, when he altered its position.
The right hand of Benjamin West, of which I saw a posthumous model at Lord de Tablets, appeared to have taken that form in which he was wont to hold the pencil.
By this concentration, this full possession of the mind, the wildness of fancy in the dark is often the source of terror ; but this is ever lessened or dispelled by any sound or sight which presents a subject to the perceptive faculty. Such is the sudden glimmer of a light, the barking of a dog, or the almost instinctive effort of the school-boy,
" Whistling aloud to keep his courage up."
All these cases, then, indicate concentration of mind. " Mental conception is uninfluenced by conscious per- ception."
I may add, that, in the heat of engagement, soldiers and sailors are often unconscious of being even seriously wounded. In the battle of Lake Thrasymene, the armies of Rome and Carthage were so absorbed in the tumult and din of war, that an earthquake, which spread desolation around them, was unheeded by these de- termined soldiers.
IDA. I have gleaned enough from your illustrations, Evelyn, to believe that we may explain by them that solemn and last reverie of the dying, when all other ideas have ceased to influence, but the most impressive —
" The ruling passion strong in death ;"
when earthly life is on the wane, and the spirit, in this expiring thought, takes its last farewell of the flesh. I remember some beautiful evidences of this influence.
366 ABSTRACTION OF INTELLECT.
It was observed that Person, after a paralytic fit, scarcely uttered a word of English ; but to the last moment spoke Greek fluently.
Dr. Adam (a master of Sir Walter Scott), on the sub- sidence of delirium, exclaimed, " It grows dark— the boys may dismiss •" and instantly expired.
The last words of Dr. Abercrombie were addressed to an imaginary patient, regarding the care of his digestive functions.
Some time after the trial of the Bristol magistrates, Lord Tenterden lapsed into a stupor from exhaustion. A short period before death he rallied, and, after con- versing with his friends for a few minutes, he raised himself on his couch, and said, " Gentlemen of the jury, you may retire ;•" and then fell back and expired.
SOMNOLENCE.— TRANCE.— CATALEPSY.
" In this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death,
Thou shall remain full two and forty hours, And then awake, as from a pleasant sleep."
ROMEO AND JULIET.
CAST. Evelyn, you have again bewildered my thoughts. Sleep, that should be the anodyne of the mind, has awakened afresh my curiosity. I am in a mood for mystery. Any more wonders ?
Ev. The prototypes of sleep, dear Castaly, are all " mysteries/' as you call them, and marked by ever- varying shades.
The most impressive conditions of the mind are these :
Unconscious and passive, as in sound sleep.
Conscious yet passive, as in dreaming.
Conscious and willing, yet powerless, as in night-mare.
Unconscious yet active, as in somnambulism.
If we go deeper in our analysis, we shall discover a state more wondrous still than all we have unravelled, in which mind is unconscious, sensationless, unwishing, motionless, powerless, as in trance or catalepsy ; an ab- solute apathy of body and complete oblivion of mind. And yet life is there !
368 SOMNOLENCE. TRANCE. CATALEPSY.
In the dream of night-mare, you remember, there is a will, but no power. In the absolute senselessness of trance, all sympathy between the brain or spinal marrow, or the influence of the nerves of motion, or of the will on muscle, altogether cease.
I will not fatigue you with varieties, such as earns, catalepsy, and the like, or with mere medical defini- tions, as syncope or fainting, epilepsy, apoplexy, and their analogies.
By the term trance I would define all those conditions in which there is protracted derangement of volition or the will; sensibility and voluntary action being sus- pended, while the vital functions are performed, yet with diminished energy ; the " deep sleep" of Paracelsus, Hieronymus Fabricius, Celsus, and other writers of antiquity.
In some the rosy colour of the lips and cheeks will not fade ; in others, they are pale and bloodless ; the body becomes cold as marble, , the pulse often imper- ceptible, and the vapour of breathing on a polished sur- face alone distinguishes the still living being from the perfect work of the sculptor. I have, however, had patients who were rosy when they fell asleep, but be- came pale about the end of the second day.
Girls often smile sweetly in full catalepsy, but the countenance will become anxious as waking approaches ; and this must ever excite suspicion. The body indeed is, to the external world, dead; for although the cata- leptic will often swallow food, while all the other muscles are in spasm, this may, I believe does, depend on mere irritability, by which, as I before told you, the brain is first excited, and then directs a movement without the mind's feeling. Catalepsy is so peculiar to young fe- males of extreme sensibility, that it may be considered an intense hysteria, depending on certain sympathies, or resulting from sudden or powerful influences on the
SOMNOLENCE. — TRANCE. — CATALEl'SN . 369
passions. The form of catalepsy marked by hysteria is least dangerous; but it is very stubborn. Probably this is the form so common in Germany.
Previous to the cataleptic acme girls are often maniac- ally violent, and will then suddenly regain their temper and their reason. They will sit and play with their fingers in a sullen mood, and the power of motion and speech and other acts of volition may be alternately impaired or lost. In some, the sleep has been preceded by fits of lethargy, by lassitude, and inaptitude to exer- tion, and perhaps a propensity to sleep-walking. The decided state of catalepsy has begun in an epileptic convulsion. In all, I think, I have seen combined with this disorder, irregular determination of blood ; in one case, where the taste and smell were gone for four or five months, the climax was suicide by arsenic.
The countenance is almost always placid in cataleptic sleep ; the eyes being turned up, the pupils dilated, but the eyelids closed. If the fit be the result of sudden fright, the features will remain as they were at that moment — the eyelid fixed, but the pupil usually sensible. The joints and muscles are pliable, and may be moulded to any form, but they remain in that position as rigidly fixed as the limbs of a lay figure, or the anchylosed joints of the self- torturing fakir ; insensible to all sti- muli, beating, tickling, or pricking.
I have seen patients lapse into a state of catalepsy, in a moment, without a struggle. I remember, during one of my visits to the asylum in Hoxton, a maniac, who often in the midst of his occupation became instan- taneously a statue; leaning a little forward, one arm lifted up, and the index finger pointed as at some in- teresting object ; the eye staring and ghastly, and the whole expression as of one rapt in an ecstacy of thought or vision.
The waking from a trance, like the recovery from the
Bb
370 SOMNOLENCE. — TRANCE. — CATA LEPS Y.
asphyxia of drowning, is painful. It is attended with a struggle, and the hand is almost invariably placed firmly over the heart, as if its actions were a painful effort to overcome congestion.
In some cases, indeed, a purple hue will suddenly suffuse the cataleptic body; the limbs are then extremely rigid, but become pliant when the healthy tint is re- stored.
The sensation in the brain of the cataleptic, as of those recovering from drowning, resembles the pricking of needles, the circulation soon becoming accelerated. Hunger is usually intense when the patient awakes. The usual duration of catalepsy is from twenty to forty hours. The return of volition is commonly marked by perspiration ; this premonitory sign is often followed by a piercing shriek, as in the case of night-mare, and, indeed, in a slight degree, of an infant's cry as soon as it is born.
It has appeared to me that the cataleptic is marked by extremes of feeling and disposition. The sensibility either being too dull for the feeling of joy, or so in- tensely excited by pleasure, as to approach the confine of delirium. One of my patients, in particular, who was an eighty-hour sleeper, endured a metamorphosis from religious enthusiasm to theatrical mania. Her Bible was discarded for romances and play-books, and even the most licentious volumes.
CAST. I have read, (I suppose in some moth-eaten tomes enshrined I know not where,) of a scholar of Lubeck, who slept seven years ; in Diogenes Laertius, of Epimenides, who slept fifty-one years in a cave ; in Ricaut, of the seven devoted sleepers of Ephesus (the same, I presume, as the seven illustrious sleepers of Mahomet's tale in the Koran) ; and of the Leucomo- rians, who fall asleep with the swallows early in No- vember, and wake at the end of April.
6
SOMNOLENCE. TRAXOE. CATALEPSY. 371
One moment more among the legends of romance. In the " Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels" it is written, that in a dark cavern of the Baltic, there were discover. five men in Roman habits, so deeply sleeping, that all efforts to awaken them were unavailing.
Ogier the Dane is now sleeping in the dungeon of Cronenburg Castle — (so recordeth the " Danske Folk Saffa.")
Prince Arthur, too, was lying, when a chronicle was writ, in a trance at Avelon; and the Britons, with implicit belief, were watching for his awaking.
Years have passed since these mysterious legends were penned, and I dare not say that the spells are broken yet.
Ev. If they then slept, sweet Castaly, they are surely sleeping now. Tales lose nothing by telling, and nature is often thus magnified into a miracle. You may how- ever believe this, that a periodical catalepsy with inter- vals may last even for years. The " Memoirs of the Academy of Berlin" record the case of a woman, who sunk into catalepsy twice a day for many years ; during which period she was married, and became the almost unconscious mother of children.
Nay, there is a story of Mynheer Vander Gucht, of Bremen, who, with very brief intermissions, slept and dreamt for thirty years ; so that, on the return of travel- lers by sea or land, the primal question was, if Mr. Vander Gucht was up !
IDA. Catalepsy, I believe, has been often feigned ; and, although it is astonishing with what apathy pain may be endured, the imposture, I presume, may be usually discovered by the proposition of some horrible remedy.
Ev. Frequently ; but many impostors have withstood the test, and triumphed in their deception. Yet it is true that the perfect state of catalepsy has been, in nb2
372 SOMNOLENCE. — TRANCE. — CATALEPSY.
very rare instances, voluntarily produced ; thus exhibit- ing the complete influence of will over an involuntary muscle, the heart.
The case of Colonel Townsend I adduce, as one of undoubted authority. This officer was able to suspend the action both of his heart and lungs, after which he became motionless, icy cold, and rigid, — a glassy film overspreading his eyes. As there was no breathing, there was no vapour apparent on the glass, when held to his mouth. During the many hours in which this voluntary trance existed, there was a total absence of consciousness, yet a. faculty of self-reanimation !
Avicenna speaks of one that could " cast himself into a palsie when he list;" and Celsus, of a priest that could " separate himself from his senses when he list, and lie like a dead man, void of life and sense." Cardan, the Pavian astrologer, brags of himself that he could do as much, and that " when he li st."
Dr. Cleghorn, of Glasgow, relates the case of a man who could stop the pulse at his wrist, and reduce him- self to the condition of syncope, by his will, of course.
Barton, the holy maid of Kent, was enabled thus to " absorb her faculties."
Restitutus, a presbyter, could also throw himself into a trance, — being insensible, except to the very loudest sounds. So says Augustin.
ASTR. So that there may not be much imposture in the case, recorded in the " Spectator," of Nicholas Hart, a professor of somnolency, who lived by sleeping. The following is his advertisement in the " Daily Courant," of that time : —
" Nicholas Hart, who slept last year in Saint Bar- tholomew's Hospital, intends to sleep this year at the
I will freely confess to you, Evelyn, my scepticism as to these ultra romantic legends ; but may my own
SOMNOLENCE. — TRANCE. CATALEPSY. 373
memory fail me not, while I relate a few strange stories, and demand of yourself confirmation.
Euphemia Lindsay, of Forfarshire, slept eight weeks, having taken nothing but (possibly) a little cold water. In the eighth week she died.
Angelica Vlies, of Delft, had fasted in a state of in- sensibility from 1822 to 1828. She took nothing but water, tea, and whey, and these in the most minute quantities.
In a record, A.D. 1545, I read that " William Foxley, a pot-maker to the Mint in London, slept in the Tower of London (not being by any means to be waked) fourteen days and fifteen nights ; and, when he waked, it seemed to him that the interval was but as one night."
Samuel Clinton, of Timbury, near Bath, often slept for a month ; and once, from April to August. He would, during this period, suddenly wake, but ere food could be administered to him, he lapsed again into a trance.
Margaret Lyall (of Edinburgh) slept from the morn- ing of June 27th to the evening of the 30th, then from July 1st to August 8th. Her breathing was scarcely perceptible, and her pulse low ; one arm was sensitive, the other senseless, to the pricking of pins. She had never any subsequent cognizance of this sleep.
A lady, at Nismes, had periodical attacks of trance ; and it is curious that the intervals of waking were always of the same duration as the previous time of sleeping, however these might vary.
In the year 1738, Elizabeth Orvin slept for four days ; and, for the period of ten years afterwards, passed seventeen hours of the twenty-four in sleep. No stimuli were powerful enough to rouse her : acupunc- turation, flagellation, and even the stinging of bees were ineffectual. Like many other somnolents, she was
374 SOMNOLENCE. TRANCE. CATALEPSY.
morose and irritable, especially previous to the sleep- ing-fit.
" Eb'zabeth Parker, of Morley Saint Peter, in Nor- folk, for a considerable time was very irregular in her times of waking, which was once in seven days ; after which they became irregular and precarious, and though of shorter duration, they were equally profound ; and every attempt at keeping her awake, or waking her, was vain. Various experiments were tried, and an itinerant empiric, elated with the hope of rousing her from what he called counterfeit sleep, blew into her nostrils the powder of white hellebore ; but the poor creature re- mained insensible to the inhumanity of the deed, which, instead of producing the boasted effect, excoriated the skin of her nose, lips, and face."
The records of medicine, I doubt not, may add a volume to these simple stories, and, perchance, may unfold to us something of the exciting causes which have induced these strange conditions ; yet they seem to me so various, in some the effect being so sudden, in others so gradual, that it were vain for me to conjec- ture.
Ev. The influence of fear, and fright, and extreme joy, will often produce instantaneous paralysis ; while that of intense study, or anxiety, will steal on by de- grees; and then, while in some cases the senses will be entirely apathetic., in others, they will be acutely excited.
Mendelssohn almost every evening immediately fell into a trance whenever " philosophy" was even named in his presence ; and so acutely deranged was then his conception of sound, that a voice of stentorian force seemed to ring in his ears, repeating to him any impres- sive conversation he had heard during the day.
Without presuming to satisfy Astrophel in explaining the full pathology of these curious cases, I may, by
SOMNOLENCE. — TRANCE. — CATALEPSY. 3?5
analogy, illustrate his question by alluding to the acute influence which impressions exert on the mind, and, through it, on the body.
Captain D , on service in Ceylon, was ordered to
march to the Kandian territory. This district had been the grave of many officers who had resided in it. From this circumstance, and the anticipation of a similar fatality to himself, he became speechless, and died in fifty hours.
During the plague of Egypt, lots were drawn for a decision as to what surgeon should remain with the sick on the departure of the troops. Mr. Dick, the army inspector, relates that on one occasion the surgeon on whom the lot fell dropped dead.
In the treaty with Meer Jaffier, Colonel Clive omitted the name of the Gentoo merchant, Omichund. This man was induced to expect treasures to the amount of one million, for his aid in deposing the Bengal nabob. From this disappointment he became speechless, and subsequently insane.
George Grokatski, a Polish soldier, deserted. He was discovered a few days after, drinking and merry- making. On his court-martial he became speechless, unconscious, and fixed as a statue. For twenty days and nights he lay in this trance, without nourishment ; he then sunk and died.
Some girls (as we read in Platerus) playing near a gibbet, one wantonly flung stones at the criminal sus- pended on it. Being violently struck the body simmff, and the girl, believing that it was alive, and was de- scending from the gibbet, fell into violent convulsions and died.
The following case, although not fatal, very power- fully displays the paralyzing effects of imagination. .
A lady in perfect health, twenty-three years of age, was asked by the parents of a friend to be present at a
376 SOMNOLENCE. TRANCE. CATALEPSY.
severe surgical operation. On consideration, it was thought wrong to expose her to such a scene, and the operation was postponed for a few hours. She went to bed, however, with the imagination highly excited, and awoke in alarm hearing, or thinking she heard, the shrieks of her friend under the agony of an operation. Convulsions and hysterics supervened, and, on their subsiding, she went into a profound sleep, which con- tinued sixty-three hours. The most eminent of the faculty were then consulted, and she was cupped, which awoke her ; but the convulsions returned, and she again went to sleep, and slept, with few intermissions, for a fortnight. The irregular periods continued for ten or twelve years ; the length of the sleeping fits from thirty to forty hours. Then came on irritability, and total want of sleep, for three months ; her usual time for sleeping being then forty-eight hours.
But if the sudden transition be excess of joy, its effect may be equally melancholy.
Wescloff was detained as a hostage by the Kalmucs, and carried along with them in their memorable flight to China. His widowed mother had mourned him dead, and, on his sudden return, the excess of joy was in- stantaneously fatal.
In the year 1544 the Jewish pirate, Sinamus Taffurus, was lying in a port of the Red Sea, called Orsenoe, and was preparing for war, being then engaged in one with the Portuguese. While he was there he received the unexpected intelligence that his son (who in the siege of Tunis had been made prisoner by Barbarossa, and by him doomed to slavery) was suddenly ransomed, and coming to his aid with seven ships, well armed. He was immediately struck as if with apoplexy, and expired on the spot.
A Swiss student, writes Zimmerman, yielded himself to intense metaphysical study, which gradually pro-
SOMNOLENCE. TRANCE. CATALEPSN . 1177
duced a complete trance of the senses ; the functions of the body being not inactive. After the lapse of a year of apparent idiocy, each sense was successively ex- cited by its proper stimulus ; the ear by loud sounds, &c. When these were restored, the mind was again perfect, although in this effort his strength was nearly exhausted.
I may add that lunar influence, though it is now somewhat out of fashion, was formerly believed even by so sage a physician as Dr. Mead and others, and Astro- phel will thank me for blending with his own examples the following case of catalepsy in a moon-struck maiden. At the full of the moon this damsel fell in a fit ; the recurrence obeying the regular periods of the tide. During the flood she lay in a speechless trance, and revived from it on the ebb. Her father was engaged on the Thames, and so struck was he with the regularity of these attacks, that on his return from the river he correctly anticipated the condition of his daughter ; and even in the night he has arisen to his work, as her cries on recovering from the fit were always a correct monitor to him of the turning of the tide.
PREMATURE INTERMENT. — RESUSCITA- TION.
" Oh sleep ! thou ape of death, lie dull upon her; And be her sense but as a monument, Thus in a chapel lying." CYMBELINE.
' Sleep may usurp on nature many hours."
PEKICLES.
IDA. These stories are, indeed, painfully interesting ; but tell us, Evelyn, is it so certain that the shaft of Azrael had irretrievably struck these unhappy creatures of whom you speak ? Is it not to be feared that in- stances of premature sepulture have too often occurred from want of scientific discernment ? On the exhuma- tion of the Cimetiere des Innocens at Paris, during the Napoleon dynasty, the skeletons were many of them discovered in attitudes indicating a struggling to get free : indeed some, we are assured, were partly out of their coffins.
To avert this awful catastrophe it was the custom, in the provinces of Germany, to place a bell-rope in the hand of a corpse for twenty-four hours before burial. We may look on this, perhaps, as one natural source of romance and mystery ; for the ringing of bells by the dead has been a favourite omen of the ghostly legends.
PREMATURE INTERMENT. 379
Ev. Alas ! even my own professional study and duties have not been free from these melancholy scenes ; and if I make not your gentle heart to tremble, fair Castaly, I will recount some of those unhappy instances of fata- lity, to which the errors and neglect of man may doom his fellow-mortal.
Miss C (of C Hall, in Warwickshire,) and
her brother were the subjects of typhoid fever. She seemed to die, and her bier was placed in the family vault. In a week her brother died also, and when he was taken to the tomb, the lady was found sitting in her grave-clothes on the steps of the vault ; having, after her waking from the trance, died of terror or exhaustion.
A girl, after repeated faintings, was apparently dead, and was taken, as a subject, into the anatomical theatre of the " Salpetriere," at Paris. During the night, faint groans were heard in the theatre, but no search was made. In the morning, it was evident that the girl had attempted to disengage herself from the winding-sheet, one leg being thrust from off the tressles, and an arm resting on an adjoining table.
A slave girl of Canton, named Leaning, apparently died. She was placed in a coffin, the lid of which re- mained unfastened, that her parents might come and see the corpse. Three days after the apparent death, while the remains were being conveyed to the grave, a noise or voice was heard proceeding from the coffin, and on removing the covering, it was found the woman had come to life again.
In 1838, at Tonnieus, in the Lower Garonne, as the graveman threw earth on a coffin he also heard groans. Much terrified, he ran away, and a crowd assembled. On opening the 'coffin, the face of the" buried man \\a> distorted, and he had disengaged his arms from the folds of his winding sheet.
The Emperor Zeno was, as it is written, prematinrly
380 PREMATURE INTERMENT.
buried; and, when the body was soon after casually discovered, it was found that he had, to satisfy acute hunger, eaten some flesh from his arm.
ASTR. One might think that Master Ainsworth, from this record,* sketched the episode of the sexton and the old coffin in his " Rookwood." The truth is equal to the fiction.
CAST. When I was at Breslau, in 1835, (and this is not one of Astrophel's fictions,) a nun of the Ursuline Convent was placed in her coffin in the church. At midnight, the sisters assembled to chaunt the vigils over the body of their sainted sister. While the holy hymn was echoing through the oratory, the nun arose, tottered to the altar, knelt before the cross, and prayed. The sisters with a cry of horror awoke the abbess ; and on her arrival, the nun again arose, and lay down in her coffin. The physician of the convent was speedily sum- moned, but, on his arrival, he found her dead.
There can scarcely be drawn a scene, combining the sublime and beautiful of romance, in higher intensity than this. It was the spectral visitation of a seraph.
IDA. Like many sublimities of nature, these mysteries have been profaned by unholy imitation ; as for instance, the reanimation of the nuns in the opera of " Robert le Diable." But there is an awful romance mingled with the history of those melancholy creatures, from whose inanimate clay the immortal spirit was thought to have parted, still more impressive. That instinctive, that in- expressible dread, with which we contemplate a corpse, is nothing in comparison with that thrill of astonish- ment which overwhelms us, when a body becomes (as in the miraculous recall of Lazarus) reanimated ; when a spirit appears to visit us from the dead. Yet this is not fear, for we know it cannot injure us; it is a feeling that we are with something beyond ourselves spiritual, which had seemed to have endured a transfiguration,
PREMATURE INTERMENT. 381
and been admitted into the order of angelic beinjr-. There must be something of the supernatural which creates this fearful wonder ; an impression on the heart that is an especial influence of the Deity. Else should we not behold with dread, instead of a sacrexl pleasure, the success of our efforts in cases of suspended anima- tion?
This visitation from another world is one of the surest indications of our spirituality ; and like the reanimation of soul and mind, and consciousness, from deep and undreaming sleep, lighting up the body into brilliancy and beauty, might drown a sceptic's reasoning in a flood of holy faith, and overwhelm him with the belief of immortality.
CAST. It is this combination of vitality and death — so seemingly a paradox — that forms the basis of many of our deepest romances ; as the " Spectre Life in Death/' in the Ancient Mariner, of the melancholy Coleridge, — himself a wild visionary of the first order. If I remember, he is writing of a spectre ship. —
" Betwixt us and the sun.
And straight the sun was fleck'd with bars —
(Heaven's mother send us grace !)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peer'd
With broad and burning face.
Alas ! (thought I, and my heart beat loud,)
How fast she neers and neers.
Are those her sails that glance in the sun,
Like restless gossameres ?
Are those her ribs, through which the sun Doth peer, as through a grate ? And is that woman all her crew 1 Is that a Death — and are there two ? Is Death that woman's mate ?
Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold,
382 RESUSCITATION.
Her skin was as white as leprosy, The night-mare Life in Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold."
Ev. It is melancholy that a noble mind should be so perverted by poppy-juice. And yet the Mahometan beats him hollow at this sort of burlesque.
There is a fiction in Sale's notes to the "Koran." During the building of his magnificent temple, King Solomon sleeps in death. He remains supported by his staff., on which he had been leaning, until a worm eats away the prop, and the body falls prostrate to the ground.
But we need not go to the East for our specimens. Even in the year 1839, in our Emerald Isle of super- stition, they would have us believe a miracle of this kind.
In a field near Lurgan, a man, called Farland, had received money from a widow, wherewith to pay her rent ; — this he failed to do. On her remonstrance and declaration, she was asked to name her witnesses. She answered, — " No one but God and herself." " Then," rejoined the man, " your God was asleep at the time." The attestation of three witnesses records, that he was instantly struck in a trance as he was resting on his spade, and in that attitude he had ever since con- tinued !
CAST. And is it not a blot on the page of science, that so many ill-fated creatures are thus, through an error, doomed to dissolution? Say, gentle Evelyn, has not your philosophy discovered some mode of discern- ment between life and death, which would smile the philanthropist on to patient watching?
Ev. To a degree. But it were vain to offer here precepts for such discrimination, which, sooth to say, are not yet absolute. The rosy tint of complexion may remain for some time, and even perspiration may break
RESUSCITATION. 383
forth, after death ; or the body may assume the most deathlike aspect, and yet vitality is only in abeyance. Among our recoveries, it is true, there are many spon- taneous rousings, and this especially if deep impression has been the cause of trance.
Listen to the following, from a journal of 1834: — " The wife of Thomas Benson, livery-lace maker, of Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, being sud- denly taken ill, to all appearance expired ; and, when every symptom of life had fled, the body was duly laid out. On the following night, between nine and ten o'clock, whilst the undertaker was in the house receiv- ing instructions for the funeral, to the astonishment and terror of the whole family, Mrs. Benson came down stairs, having been in a trance nearly thirty hours. Her situation has so terribly shocked her, that but faint hopes are entertained of her recovery."
It is melancholy to know how often these cases are abandoned to nature; but science may do much, and should do more, to relieve them ; although we possess not the wondrous phial of Renatus, nor have developed the creative mysteries of Prometheus or Frankenstein.
Yet the recovery of Frangois de Civille, was almost as great a wonder. He was thrown, at the siege of Rouen, into insensibility. He was, in this state, carried home by his servant. During a week he became warm, but exhibited no other sign of life. He was, at this period, flung out of a window by the besiegers, and cast upon a dunghill, where he lay naked for three or four days. Yet, even after this, he was restored to life.
ASTR. You confess the wonder, Evelyn, that is some concession ; you may, perchance, believe another of equal interest.
" My mother being sick to death of a fever three months after I was born, which was the occasion she nursed me no longer, her friends and servants thought,
384 RESUSCITATION.
to all outward appearance, she was dead, and so almost two days and a night. But Dr. Winston coming to comfort my father, went into my mother's room, and looking earnestly in her face, said, ' She is so hand- some, and looks so lovely, I cannot think she is dead ;' and suddenly took a lancet out of his pocket, and with it cut the sole of her foot, which bled. Upon this he immediately caused her to be laid upon the bed again, and to be rubbed, and such means, as she came to life, and opening her eyes, saw two of her kinswomen stand by her, my Lady Knolleys and my Lady Russell, both with great wide sleeves, as the fashion then was, and said, ' Did not you promise me fifteen years, and are you come again?' which they not understanding, per- suaded her to keep her spirits quiet in that great weak- ness wherein she then was ; but some hours after she desired my father and Dr. Howlsworth might be left alone with her, to whom she said, f I will acquaint you, that during the time of my trance I was in great quiet, but in a place I could neither distinguish or describe ; but the sense of leaving my girl, who is dearer to me than all my children, remained a trouble upon my spirits. Suddenly I saw two by me clothed in long white garments, and methought I fell down upon my face upon the dust, and they asked me why I was so troubled in so great happiness. I replied, O let me have the same grant given to Hezekiah, that I may live fifteen years, to see my daughter a woman ; to which they answered, It is done, and then at that instant I awoke out of my trance.' And Dr. Howlsworth did then affirm that that day she died made just fifteen years from that time."
I remember a story of the effect of deep impression on a sensitive mind : the sleep of a love-sick Juliet, without the entrancing draught of the friar.
A young French lady in the Rue St. Honore, at
RESUSCITATION. 385
Paris, was condemned by her father to a hated marriage while her heart was devoted to another. She fell into a trance, and was buried. Under some strange influ- ence her lover opened her grave, and she was revived, and married. Thus the romance of the " Beauty of Verona" was acted without its tragedy.
I have heard, but where I recollect not, a story of another French lady, who was actually the subject of an anatomist. On the evidence of some faint signs of vitality, he not only restored the lady to life, but united himself to her in marriage.
There is no doubt, also, that Rachael, Lady Russell, would have been buried alive, had not the devoted affection of her husband, and his constant visits to her coffin, prevented it.
I read, too, that Shorigny, an hysterical girl in Paris, was watched daily by her physician, after he was assured by the friends that she was dead. On the sixth day, the cloth covering was seen to move, the eyes soon after opened, and she gradually recovered.
Ev. It is one of the anomalies of our science, that similar causes will often produce opposite effects. We may be thrown into trance by fright ; and intense alarm may be the cause of recovery. I may relate an oriental anecdote as an analogy, which, however, I beg you to receive with some reservation.
A Persian, at the siege of Sardis, was about to kill Croesus, whom he did not recognise. By his side was the king's dumb child, who, in a sudden paroxysm of agony, screamed out, " Kill not Croesus." From this instant (as it were a miracle), Herodotus writes, his speech was fully restored !
We learn from Bourgeois, in 1838, that a medical man, from the sudden influence of grief, sunk into a cataleptic state, but his consciousness never left him. The lamentations of his wife, the sympathetic condo-
c c
386 RESUSCITATION.
lence of his medical friends, and the arrangements re- garding his funeral, were to him distinctly audible. He knew that he was in his coffin, and that there was a solemn procession following him to the grave. As the solemn words of " Earth to earth" were uttered, and the dust fell on his coffin lid, the consciousness of this, and his horror at his impending fate, burst the fetters of his icy trance — he shrieked aloud, and was saved.
In the " Psychological Magazine" we read of a lady who fell into a state of catalepsy, after a violent nervous disorder.
" It seemed to her, as if in a dream, that she was really dead. Yet she was perfectly conscious of all that happened around her in this dreadful state. She dis- tinctly heard her friends speaking, and lamenting her death, at the side of her coffin ; she felt them pull on her dead clothes, and lay her in it. This feeling pro- duced a mental anxiety which was indescribable. She tried to cry, but her soul was without power, and could not act on her body. She had the contradictory feel- ing, as if she were in her own body, and yet not in it, at one and the same time. It was equally impossible for her to stretch out her arm, or to open her eyes, as to cry, although she continually endeavoured to do so. The internal anguish of her mind was, however, at its utmost height, when the funeral hymns were sung, and when the lid of the coffin was about to be nailed on. The thought that she was to be buried alive was the first one which gave activity to her soul, and caused it to operate on her corporeal frame."
I have been assured that the soldier who has been placed in his grave by such an error, has been awoke in his coffin by the volley fired over him.
Parallel with these are the instances in which vitality seemed to be instantly excited by acute pain.
I remember the case of a cataleptic girl, related by
RESUSCITATfON. 387
the Abbe Menon, who was doomed to dissection ; the first stroke of the scalpel awoke her, and she lived.
Cardinal Sommaglia was not so fortunate. He fell into syncope from intense grief, and it was decided that he should be opened and embalmed. As the surgeon's knife punctured the lungs, the heart throbbed, and the cardinal attempted to avert the knife with his hand ; but the die was cast, and he shortly died.
The Abbe Prevost was also sacrificed in this way.
As Vesalius, the physician of Philip II., was opening the thorax of a Spanish gentleman, the heart palpitated. Death also occurred here. Vesalius was brought before the Inquisition, but was pardoned.
A gentleman was seized, apparently with apoplexy, while at cards. A vein was opened in both arms, but no blood flowed. He was placed in a room with two watchers, who slept, alas ! too long ; for in the morning the room was deluged with blood from the punctures, and his life was gone.
These are indeed unhappy instances of the errors of omission and commission entailed on the fallibility of science. I believe a French author, Bruhier, has col- lected fifty-two cases of persons buried alive, four which were dissected prematurely, fifty-three which recovered, and seventy-two which were falsely reported dead.
ASTR. There is a solemn problem associated with this, on which I have often reflected, the solution of which, I presume, your philosophy cannot offer to us. At what moment would the mind cease to influence the body, were there no recovery from the trance ? I have sometimes felt a mysterious influence, apart, I am sure, from philosophy, that whispered me, the life, which I had watched in its ebb, was at length gone. Yet, of the transit of an immaterial spirit, although convinced of the sublime truth, it is certain we know nothing.
Ev. Nothing demonstrative. It is not, however, when c c2
388 RESUSCITATION.
the body seems dead, for consciousness, or the systemic life, may for awhile be suspended by mere cold. But dissolution is that point, unknown to us, when the prin- ciple of life (whether that be the influence of arterial blood, or electricity, magnetism, or galvanism,) is not excitable — when molecular death has ensued ; not even irritability, that vis insita or vis nervosa of Haller, re- maining. Of course mind must instantly depart on the commencement of decomposition, the brain being then totally incompatible with mind. The stoics believed the soul to occupy the body until it was putrified, and resolved into its materia prima.
ASTR. I once thought, Evelyn, that the difference in the tenacity of life in the man and the zoophyte might with some subtlety be explained on this principle — thus : That the life of a reasoning creature was in its soul ; that of an inferior animal in its spinal irritability. Thus, when man is decapitated, his soul is gone from him — he is dead ; but wrhen vitality is in the vis nervea, as in the insect, life may exist without a head, that is, the organ of a soul. The butterfly will flutter, I am told, long after decapitation.
Ev. The excito-motary principle illustrates this fact, without the requisition of such a notion ; and life, we know, may be artificially sustained for a time after de- capitation. The interesting physiology of the reflex actions of a nerve explains this, and all the terrific con- vulsions of galvanized bodies.
CAST. I think I have a glimpse of your meaning, Evelyn. May we not believe, then, that there is truth in the affirmation, that Charlotte Corday*s cheeks blushed at her exposure after her decollation ?
Ev. There is far more romance than truth, fair Cas- taly, in this story ; but I do believe the probability of a story almost as marvellous, that the lips of Mary Stuart prayed visibly after her head fell from her body. Soem-
RESUSCITATION. 339
mering has written, that if the open eyes of a decollated head be turned full on the sun, the lids will immediately close, but this of course without consciousness.
CAST. And yet some learned men believed the head of Charlotte Corday sensible of its state, from this as- serted fact of its blushing.
Ev. They should not have believed without complete evidence. Indeed, this question may now be deemed decided in the negative, by the experiments of a learned professor of Heidelburg, on the head of Sebastian Zink, decollated at Rastadt. On placing bitters on the tongue, and hallooing "pardon" in his ear at the instant of decapitation, it was proved that there was an utter insensibility to all.
IDA. Then sensation is instantly destroyed. In this, as in all his dispensations, how is the mercy of the Deity displayed !
Ev. It is still a question with us, whether our phy- sical sensations on the point of dissolution are often so acute as they appear.
Cabanis and the famous Guillotine declared their conviction that no pain was felt at the moment of or after decapitation. In the works of Lord Bacon, we read of one who was suspended till he was all but dead, and his declaration was that his suffering was a mere trifle. Cowper also left a manuscript, in which he states that in one of his three attempts at suicide, he hung himself over his door in the Temple, but that he did not suffer in the least.
IDA. And in drowning ?
Ev. While the medical committee of the Humane Society were framing those scientific rules which have rendered the process of resuscitation so successful, I remember especially one pale and melancholy girl, who glided in before us like a spectre. She had attempted suicide, but her intention was happily thwarted, after
390 RESUSCITATION.
she had been for many minutes in the water, and was apparently lifeless.
True, the mental agony which prompts to such an act, will often overwhelm sensation ; but this creature was conscious of her act, and assured us that the sensa- tion of drowning was but an intense feeling of faintness preceding a sinking into insensibility, with a short spas- modic struggle ; an uneasiness rather than a pain. When Clarence therefore, recounting his dream, exclaims, —
" My God, methought what pain it was to drown !"
I believe, he should rather have referred his feelings to his recovery, if the words of the pale girl were true ; for, when consciousness and sensation are returning, the feeling is intense. Throughout the body, as it is recovering from apathetic numbness, the sense of re- turning circulation of the blood is terrible : an acute sensation of pins and needles in the brain and the marrow of the spine. No wonder, then, that these resuscitated beings will request that no efforts may be made, should they again be in the state of suspended animation. The sensation on being born is probably as acute as that on dissolution.
IDA. Then there is consciousness ?
Ev. The evidence of Dr. Adam Clarke will illustrate this interesting question. Yet I differ somewhat with him, regarding so perfect a consciousness during sub- mersion. In his life, you will see the following dia- logue with Dr. Lettsom, in which Clarke describes his own case of immersion :
" Dr. Lettsom said, — ' Of all that I have seen re- stored, or questioned afterwards, I never found one who had the smallest recollection of any thing that passed, from the moment they went under water, till the time in which they were restored to life and thought.' Dr. Clarke answered Dr. L., — * I knew a case to the con-
RESUSCITATION. 3Q1
trary.' ' Did you, indeed ?' was my own. I was once drowned.' And then related the circumstances, and added, — ' I saw my danger, but thought the mare would swim, and I knew I could ride when we were overwhelmed. It appeared to me, that I had gone to the bottom with my eyes open. At first, I thought I saw the bottom clearly, and then felt neither apprehension nor pain ; on the contrary, I felt as if I had been in the most delightful situation; my mind was tranquil and uncommonly happy. I felt as if in Paradise, and yet I do not recollect that I saw any per- son ; the impressions of happiness seemed not to be derived from any thing around me, but from the state of my mind. And yet I had a general apprehension of pleasing objects ; and I cannot recollect that any thing appeared defined, nor did my eye take in any object, only I had a general impression of a green colour, as of fields or gardens. But my happiness did not arise from these, but appeared to consist merely in the tranquil, indescribably tranquil, state of my mind. By and by, I seemed to awake as out of a slumber, and felt unut- terable pain and difficulty of breathing; and now I found I had been carried by a strong wave, and left in very shallow water upon the shore, and the pain I felt was occasioned by the air once more inflating my lungs and producing respiration. How long I had been under water I cannot tell ; it may however be guessed at by this circumstance : when restored to the power of reflection, I looked for the mare, and saw her walking leisurely down shore towards home, then about half a mile distant from the place where we were submerged. Now, I aver, — 1st. That in being drowned I felt no pain ; — 2nd. That I did not, for a simple moment, lose my consciousness ; — 3rd. I felt indescribably happy, and, though dead as to the total suspension of all the functions of life, yet I felt no pain in dying ; and
392 RESUSCITATION.
I take for granted, from this circumstance, those who die by drowning feel no pain, and that probably it is the easiest of all deaths; — 4th. That I felt no pain till once more exposed to the action of the atmo- spheric air, and then I felt great pain and anguish in returning to life, which anguish, had I continued under water, I should have never felt ; — 5th. That animation must have been totally suspended from the time I must have been under water, which time might be in some measure ascertained by the distance the mare was from the place of my submersion, which was at least half a mile, and she was not, when I first observed her, making any speed ; — 6th. Whether there were any thing preternatural in my escape, I cannot tell ; or whether a ground swell had not, in a merely natural way, borne me to the shore, and the retroces- sion of the tide (for it was then ebbing), left me exposed to the open air, I cannot tell. My preservation must have been the effect of natural causes ; and yet it ap- pears to be more rational to attribute it to a superior agency. Here then, Dr. L., is a case widely different, it appears, from those you have witnessed, and which argues very little for the modish doctrine of the mate- riality of the soul.' Dr. Lettsom appeared puzzled with this relation, but did not attempt to make any remarks on it."
And well he might ; for if animation were totally suspended, consciousness would have been suspended also.
TRANSMIGRATION.— ANALYSIS OF TRANCE.
" Thou shall hold the opinion of Pythagoras, ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy gramlam "
TWELFTH NIGHT.
" Through all thy veins shall run A cold and drowsy humour, which shall seize Each vital spirit." ROMEO AMD JULIET.
ASTR. You have granted me more than you desire, dear Evelyn. If life be restored, it had never deserted the body, and yet the mind had deserted it.
The mind and body, then, are both independent of each other. From this truth, a metaphysical question of deep and wondrous interest arises. In what condition does the mind exist, during so long a period, uninfluencing and uninfluenced by the power of perception ? I remem- ber searching for some elucidation of this mystery among those ghost-stories of the Hebrews, founded on the " purgatorie of souls" in Stehelin's " Traditions of the Jews," but I rose from my reading unenlightened.
IDA. And ever will, Astrophel. Profane curiosity must fail in such a study ; adoration alone can sanctify this mystic question, on which theologians and philoso- phers, even those devoutly confident in the sublime truths of immortality, have so essentially differed.
Like Astrophel, Paley inquires where is the soul
394 TRANSMIGRATION.
during suspended vitality? and Priestly, where when the body was created? Hume, with the subtlety of a sceptic, asks how can the soul long be the same, seeing that, like the body, its particles are constantly chang- ing ? While Glanville thinks himself a wondrous wight, as he prates of its " essential spissitude, a something that is more subtle than body, contracting itself into a less ubi."
Were this sublime secret fathomable by the deepest intellect, then would be unfolded things above, which are ordained to be ever mysteries to creatures on earth ; such as the future existence of the spirit, and the nature of Paradise.
Although revelation has given us glimpses, enough to satisfy humble devotion, what mind can decide on the exact nature and changes of its own future state ? The negative answer is at once returned by the variety of these learned opinions : — That the soul is, immediately after death, submitted to its reward or punishment ; — That its state after death is one of half happiness or misery, until it be again joined to its body on the resur- rection ; and then it shall enjoy or suffer the extremes of felicity or torment ; — That the soul rests in quiet un- consciousness until the day of judgment ; — And lastly, that souls are purified by purgatory and comparative suffering, and then are admitted into the realms of perpetual enjoyment.
ASTR. Is it not strange that in this notion of purga- tory, with slight variations, pagans, and Romanists, and Egyptians, and Brahmins, so nearly accord? In the creed of the Brahmins, there is something of sublimity, whatever may be their error, and Ida will not chide, if I repeat the essence of their creed, which Robertson has gathered from the " Baghvat Geeta."
" Every intelligent nature, particularly the souls of men, they conceived to be portions separated from this
TRANSMIGRATION. 395
great spirit ; to which, after fulfilling their destiny on earth, and attaining a proper degree of purity, they would be again reunited. In order to efface the stains with which a soul, during its residence on earth, has been defiled by the indulgence of sensual and corrupt appetites, they taught that it must pass, in a long suc- cession of transmigrations, through the bodies of dif- ferent animals, until, by what it suffers and what it leaves in the various forms of its existence, it shall be so thoroughly refined from all pollution, as to be rendered meet for being absorbed into the divine es- sence, and returns, like a drop, into that unbounded ocean from which it originally issued."
Aristotle, in taking up this notion of transmigration in his book "De Anima," says that "the soul was always joined to a body, sometimes to one, sometimes to another." And from this idea were taken the stories of Fadlallah and the Dervis, in the " Spectator," of the " Transmigrations of Indus," and the beautiful fable of " Psyche," or the soul, which when a body died, could not live alone on earth, and so crept into another. Herodotus, in the second book of his history, has some allusions to the Egyptian creed ; and, indeed, the fear of this transmigration was the origin of mummies among the Copts. Their belief that the soul (the immortality of which they very early, if not the first, decided,) could not leave the body when entire, induced them to pre- serve that body as long as possible ; and the mummy unrollers and hieroglyphic readers must commit sad sacrilege, by exposing their sacred dust to the decom- position of air.
When the body was dissolved, however, the soul entered that of some animal that instant born ; and profane commentators have, on this creed, presumed to explain the sacred story of the " banishment and savage life of Nebuchadnezzar." At the end of 30,000 years,
396 TRANSMIGRATION.
it again entered that of a man ; and it is likely that their object in embalming was, to have the soul re-enter the same body from choice and habit.
Simonides, four hundred years after the siege of Troy, ungallantly reversed this doctrine, deciding that " the souls of women were formed of the principles and elements of brutes." The Pythagorean system was, if not more courteous, at least more just.
" Thus all things are but altered, nothing dies ; And here and there th' embodied spirit flies. By time, or force, or sickness, dispossess'd, And lodges, where it lights, in bird or beast ; Or hunts without, till ready limbs it find, And actuates those according to their kind. From tenement to tenement is toss'd, The soul is still the same, the figure only lost."
This is from Dryden's translation of Chaucer.
And Burton's record is as follows :
" The Pythagoreans defend Metempsychosis and Palin- genesia, that souls go from one body to another, epotd prius Lethes nudd, as men into wolves, beares, dogs, hogs, as they were inclined in their lives, or participated in conditions :
' inqueferlnas
" Lucian's cock was first Euphorbus, a captaine :
' IUe ego fnam meminij Trojani tempore belli : eram.' "
And Plato, in Timaeus, and in
Ev. Enough of Plato, dear Astrophel; or believe, with me, that his philosophy on this point was merely figurative of the similarity of mind, or genius, or feature, between the dead and the living ; — as it was said of old, that the soul of Raphael had transmigrated to the body
TRANSMIGRATION. 307
of Francesco Mazzola (Parmegiano), because his style and personal beauty so closely resembled those of the all but divine master of his art.
And pray what was the gist of that special astrono- mer, who affirmed that he " saw something written in the moon?" — A wild romance only? No, forsooth. Pythagoras may classically vociferate —
" errat, et illinc,
Hue venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus Spiritus : eque feris humana in corpora transit, Inque feras noster."
But read further, and you will find the high moral to be a severe injunction against flesh-eating :
" Then let not piety be put to flight, To please the taste of glutton appetite ; But suffer innate souls secure to dwell, Lest from their seats your parents you expel : With rabid hunger feed upon your kind, Or from a beast dislodge a brother's mind."
Think you this injunction will be obeyed, in the face of the " Almanac des Gourmands ?"
IDA. Evelyn is severe. May I tell him that, among the records of the East, he will find incidents blended with this idea which may almost consecrate the creed of a Pagan. As the honey is hung close to the poisoned sting of the bee, there may be a bright spot to illumi- nate the gloomy annals of superstition. The very belief in transmigration may impart an atom of mercy, even to an infidel ; and where superstition, shorn of the light of Christianity, must prevail, it were better sure to foster that notion which may, even in one little sentiment, half humanize the heart.
Listen to this contrast, between some orient sects, along the eastern shores of Hindostan. The daughters of Guzzer/it fold their infants to their bosoms (hugged
398 TRANSMIGRATION.
with opium ; and when the babe is thus poisoned, the Hindu girl will answer with a languid and seeming innocent smile, "It is not difficult to blast a flower- bud."
Then the Kurrada Brahmins (as we read in the " Rudhiradhyaya"), believing themselves the agents of Vishara Boot, the spirit of poison, sacrifice the pundits to their vampire goddess, Maha-Lackshmi.
Equally blind, yet more happy in the nature of their superstition, are the Shravuch Banians, or the prose- lytes of Jena. The Yati, or officiating priest of this order, in purifying the temples, sweeps the floor with the Raju-hurrun, a broom of cotton-threads, lest hap- less one little insect may be destroyed. And this we may believe, from the creed of transmigration being influential among these people. Sir Paul Rycaut also, in his oriental history, informs us of parallel incidents among the devout Mahomedans, who, believing that in the body of a brute may reside the soul of a departed relative, ransom, with their gold, many a bird that would otherwise flutter away its captivity in a cage.
CAST. I will not flout your praises, Ida ; but, in our own island, this illusion has rather led to captivity. I remember the story of a lady, living in Worcestershire, who, under the innocent delusion that her daughters were changed into singing-birds, hung her pew in the cathedral with cages of goldfinches and linnets. And Lord Orford, in his " Reminiscences," thus records the monomania of the Duchess of Kendal :
" In a tender mood, he (King George) promised the duchess that if she survived him, and it were possible for the departed to return to this world, he would make her a visit. The duchess, on his death, so much ex- pected the accomplishment of that engagement, that a large raven, or some black fowl, flying into one of the windows of her villa, at Isleworth, she was persuaded
ANALYSIS OF TRANCE AND ITS SYNONYMES. 399
it was the soul of her departed monarch so accoutred, and received and treated it with all the respect and ten- derness of duty, till the royal bird, or she, took the last flight."
ASTR. You spoke of the absolute senselessness of trance ; and yet there were some hints of the awakening power of fear. Is this consistent ?
Ev. I expected your objection. In the cases of per- fect catalepsy, the brain is not conscious of its mind, or if the mind be active, there is no assurance of its acti- vity. But, as its faculties are awakened, it usually be- gins to work exactly where it left off; — one of the most imposing proofs, both of a separate existence during life, and of our bodies' unconsciousness of this transient disunion.
ASTR. I may own, Evelyn, that your illustrations of our questions, in despite of some straining at explana- tion, carry, on many points, conviction to my own mind, but not on all. There is another question equally interesting with the former. How is vitality preserved during this protracted abstinence ?
Ev. Remember, dear Astrophel, my confession, that there are inexplicable mysteries. But, to the point of your last question. We are aware of the long period during which the body may fast after shipwreck, or beneath a fallen cliff, or even on the incarceration of animals for the purpose of experiment. Thus Captain Bligh, and seventeen persons, sailed four thousand miles in an open boat, with a small bird occasionally for the food of all. The Juno's crew, wrecked off Aracan, existed twenty-three days without food ; and the wreck of the Medusa is fresh in our memories. Here the body feeds on its own fat, shrinking until that supply is lost, and then it dies.
I might relate to you the very impressive stories of Anne Moore, of Tutbury ; of Janet M'Cleod, told by
6
400 ANALYSIS OF TRANCE
Dr. Mackenzie ; and many strange facts related by Dr. Willan, Sir William Hamilton, and others.
I might refer you to legends, of which I can scarcely press for your belief. As the strange but authenticated story of Anna Garbero, of Racconiggi, forty miles from Turin, who existed without nutrition for two years, be- coming like a shrivelled mummy. And that of Eve Hergen, who existed thirteen years upon the odour of flowers ! But even with that incredulous frown of Astrophel's, and that faint smile of thine, fair Castaly, let me at once to my explanations.
In natural sleep the functions of the body are im- peded. One of these is digestion. As there is little waste of the system there is little necessity for repletion, and life can be supported by a very slight action of the heart, a minute current of blood; like the slender vitality of infants, who, even in a state of health, seem frequently scarcely to breathe. The circulation is ma- terially influenced in sleep, the pulse being slower and more feeble than during waking ; the relaxation of the cutaneous vessels inducing frequent perspiration, espe- cially in debilitated systems, and in the last stages of adynamic fevers.
The body of the cataleptic patient descends to the condition of less complex animal life, in which there appears a much greater simplicity of organization ; and we well know, as we descend in the scale of creation, towards the cold-blooded single-hearted animals, and especially if we reach the zoophyte, in how exact a pro- portion to this simplicity of structure' is the tenacity of life increased. " Fish," says Sir John Franklin, " were taken out of the nets frozen, and became a solid mass of ice, being by a blow of a hatchet easily split open; they, however, recovered their vitality on being thawed/'
A course of systematic abstinence will enable us, if we wished it, to endure extreme privations, which a
AND ITS SYNONYME8. 401
high feeder would soon sink under ; and this is probably the discipline adopted by the fakirs of India, who fast so long under the influence of superstitious de- votion.
Vaillant's spider lived without food nearly one year ; John Hunter's toad fourteen months; land tortoises eighteen months; a beetle three years; and two ser- pents, according to Shaw, five years ; an antelope has survived twenty days without food; some dogs forty days ; an eagle 23 days.
Now all animals fall asleep at certain temperatures, which they cannot resist, but the common effect of extreme cold is death. Dr. Solander was yielding to the influence of intense cold in Terra del Fuego, but was saved by the firmness of Sir Joseph Banks. Richmond, the black, lay down on the snow to sleep, and died.
There is a close analogy between this state and the hybernation of animals, although the causes are not similar. Animalcule often become torpid for lack of moisture, and, even after the lapse of twenty-seven years, have been revivified by water. The small furcu- laria anastobea will repeatedly become animated and lively by a single drop of water, its previous condition being completely quiescent. The snail, the alligator, indeed most of the ophidian and saurian reptiles, assume the torpid state in a period of extreme drought; and Humboldt states this also of the centenes solosus, a Madagascar hedgehog.
This hybernation of animals, as of the marmot and the dormouse, resembles the deep sleep arising from cold of a certain degree ; for if this be intense, they will sometimes be momentarily roused from it. They may be constantly kept awake by heat and powerful light.
Thus hybernation and the sleep of plants take place from the withdrawal of stimuli ; heat being the animal — light the vegetable stimulus.
Dd
402 ANALYSIS OF TRANCE
CAST. The sleep of plants ? a fiction surely !
Ev. Nay, a truth. The irritability of plants is ex- cited by their peculiar stimulus; when this is with- drawn, they fall to sleep. Most of the discerns flowers turn to the sun in his course, as the sun-flower, the helianthus, and the croton. The acacia leaves at noon point towards the zenith. The tamarind, the oxalis, and the trefoil, fold their leaves on the exclusion of light. The evening primrose shuts its blossom at sunset, while that minion of the moon, the night-blowing cactus, then only begins to bloom ; perhaps like the owl, and goat- sucker, and bat, who find the sun too powerful an excitant.
Vegetables may be put asleep by the withdrawal of proper stimulus, — the exclusion of this light. But this is a law of nature, and ordained for a special purpose. It is chiefly during fructification ; the leaves at night folding round the flowers and seed-vessels, to protect them from the chilling blight of the night cold, which would congeal their juices. In this condition of the plant its irritability ceases, but the circulation of its sap- vessels is not suspended. Its vitality continues, but if the exercise of its peculiar phenomena be long discon- tinued, it will fade and die. Now the vis insita of the muscle resembles vegetable irritability ; and, as this is lost and sensibility suspended, the body is indeed in a condition of vegetable sleep ; for vegetables have not of course sensation, although the Darwinian romance would endow the dion&a, the hedysarum, and the mi- mosa with sensibility, and all the blossom-beauties of Flora with the fervour of sexual passion. Trance then is caused by the removal of a stimulus. As somnambu- lism may result from a redundancy of nervous energy, trance and catalepsy, as well as incubus, seem to arise from an inefficient secretion or supply of this quality, in whatever it may consist, or an impediment to its trans-
AND ITS SYNONYME8. 403
mission from the sensorium or brain to the expansion of a nerve. Thus the motive power of a muscle is in these diseases suspended, which inparalysis may be permanent/;/ impaired or destroyed.
To describe this state, I must abound in negatives. The brain is not conscious : there is no sensation. Even the marrow by its reflex faculty does not excite a muscle : there is no action : the mind has no cognizance : the body is for a time paralyzed. What is there then which may be termed life ? merely involuntary circulation and gentle breathing. In this condition also there is a con- gestion of dark blood about the brain and in the right side of the heart ; the circulation being reduced to an extreme lentor or sluggishness, while in real asphyxia there is a total stagnation.
I have done with minute pathology: as there are however two diseases, epilepsy and insanity, which may be the result of catalepsy, I may offer a precept on the point. The propensity to trance cannot suddenly be averted, but the state of the body and mind are impor- tant studies for our treatment. Melancholy and apathy are the features of the mind of the cataleptic, and languor and faulty secretions the symptoms of the body. Cheerful society, sympathy with suffering, but firmness in resisting sloth and erroneous fancies, and the direc- tion of the patient's mind to moral recreations, compre- hend the sum of our mental treatment.
It is equally essential to ensure regulation of the secretions, especially those of the liver. We should employ cupping from the nape of the neck, if there be pain, or heat, or fulness of the head, and constant but gentle exercise. The head should not be low during sleep, nor should food be taken within two hours of retiring to rest. I believe obedience to these slight precepts will frequently mitigate, perhaps in the end avert the attacks, especially if they have arisen from Dd2
404 ANALYSIS OF TRANCE AND ITS SYNONYMES.
diseased conditions of the body, or gloomy or depraved studies, and deep contemplation.
The most simple or unconnected form of catalepsy, is that most likely to end in madness. Perhaps, too, in deep and gloomy subjects, which begin by absorbing mind and sense, the end is thus; so that cataleptic abstraction is but the reverie or foretaste of mania.
As to suspected cases of still existing vitality : where there is plethora, I would employ bleeding, or cupping, insufflation, Galvanism; and I should not in extreme cases fear acupuncture of the heart, and galvanic shocks then transmitted through the needle. Beclard, in " La Pitie," in Paris, allows the needle to remain three or four minutes and then withdraws it, and I have learned from my oriental friends, that the Chinese practice this mode extensively.
MESMERISM.
' Thus smiling, as some fly had tickled slumber. Not as Death's dart, being laugh'd at."
CYMBXLINE.
1 By some illusion see thou bring her here, I'll charm his eyes against she doth appear."
' Such tricks bath strong imagination."
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.
IDA. You are very formidable creatures, Evelyn, if you can touch and wound the heart of a sensitive girl so easily ; we must be wary, dear Castaly. It must be a desperate case that justifies so desperate a remedy ; yet, with all this danger, the magi of our day will, as I have heard, induce by their art this very state of trance.
ASTB. Magnetic sleep. If the phenomena of this animal magnetism be not a mystery, it is at least a curi- osity. And yet Evelyn will tell us that they, too, obey the common laws of our nature. I believe, however, there are stories of most strange and novel interest, be- yond the scope even of his philosophy.
Ev. The hand of a magnetiser seems, I confess, to effect a wonder ; but your challenge will be fatal to you, Astrophel. In this same question of animal magnetism we may discover the spring of all your mysteries. The close analogies between the natural and imparted phe-
406 MESMERISM.
nomena of trance and magnetic sleep and somnambulism, and somnambulic blindness, and magnetic ecstacy ; even the frauds of lucid vision and clairvoyance, and the vaunted gift of prophetic divination, with the explana- tion of some, and the refutation of others, will dispel the most subtle arguments in proof of divine influence ; seeing that the process is conducted by men of mortal mould, who claim no merit even for the possession of occult learning.
CAST. Mercy, dearest Evelyn, mercy. No more phi- losophy to-night. The smile of yon planet Venus, that was twinkling from out its cerulean blue, is veiled in a cloud ; for our cold discourse is treason to its in- fluence. Be ready with your stories, Astrophel.
Ev. The history of Mesmerism is a romance in itself, dear Castaly. If I invade not the province of Astrophel, I will, as some apology for my dull prosing, sketch its progress by way of episode.
You must know, then, that it was Maximilian Holl who first, from the influence of his magnets on the body, imparted the practical idea of animal magnetism to Mesmer, who had already written his inaugural thesis, at Vienna, on " Planetary Influence," and had laid down this unblushing aphorism: "There is one health, one disease, one remedy, and one physician, and that physician am I." His immediate proselytes were Deslon at Paris, and Gmelin at Heilbronne, and Reicke at Stutgard, and Kluge at Berlin. Encouraged by the Swedenborgian tenets, this magic brought immense re- venue into the purses of Mainanduc in England, and the rest of its revivers ; so that one hundred guineas were given for a course of lectures and experiments, and fifteen guineas for a consultation and the imparting of its influence.
In after times Miss Prescott, among others, gained great fame in the art : but De Lauterbourg was one of
MESMERISM. 407
its most popular professors. Three thousand patients, it is said, were often waiting for the magnetic influence about his house at Hammersmith.
In 1784 an ordonnance of the French king confirmed Mesmer in his working of these apparent miracles. By tractions on the body, either with the hand or by sub- stances magnetized with his " imponderable fluid/' by champooinff, and the accompaniment of sweet music, a state of enchantment of the senses was induced. Con- vulsions and mania were often excited in the " Hall of Crisis," which was lined by soft cushions to protect the convulsionaries. These paroxysms and tempests of the brain Mesmer seemed to control, like a second Prospero, with his wand of enchantment, gliding, in robes of silk, among the multitude of devotees, whom novelty and voluptuousness had attracted to his shrine.
To study and report on these mysteries, commissioners were appointed by the " Faculty of Medicine," by the " Academy of Sciences," and by the " Royal Society of Medicine." These savans referred all to the influence of imagination, or of emotion in sensitive systems ; and that there must be this sensitive predisposition is often proved, for idiots, and those who have been blindfold, and unconscious children, remain uninfluenced, although it is declared by one that he magnetized an idiot baby !
I must observe, that before the commissions in Paris, especially that of which Franklin was a member, not the slightest influence was observed ; and the ex- periments of Monsieur Berner, who was the chief mani- pulator, were a perfect failure, especially in regard to the clairvoyance.
Astrophel reminds me by his frown
ASTB. That magnetic power is not granted to all ; that all possess not the essential qualities of mind and body. It was affirmed that the operator must have his mind abstracted, and teeming with affection and bene-
6
408 MESMERISM.
volence towards his patients ; must believe himself a very magnet, and feel a desire of benefiting mankind. Thus a sympathy, or incorporation of atmospheres, was induced, by which disease was influenced ; and even in persons distant from each other, by an intensity of thought the patient tasted, smelt, or heard, the flavours, odours, or sounds which at that moment affected the senses of the operator. The magnetizer must thus be confident that, by his will, he can pass his whole nervous energy into his patient. It is essential, also, that the mind of the patient should have a corresponding willingness to be mag- netized.
Ev. And this congenial platonism is sometimes so intense, that offers of magnetic marriage are made by the ecstatic ladies to their magnetizers, even though it may not be leap-year, on the plea that the loneliness of magnetic widowhood distressed them, and that the pos- session of a sleeping partner was better than sleeping alone.
Under this interesting disposition for magnetic union, the eyes of the maiden being fixed on the magnetizer intensely, his hands were passed before her body, his fingers thus forming natural conductors, by which the magnetic fluid was conveyed from the positive to the negative magnetic body. Then came the wonders of this influence. The patient was warmed by the bene- volence of the magnetizer, who felt an aura or tingling in the part corresponding to any painful part of the patient's body which was relieved or cured. Indeed, Bertrand assures us that many told him they saw a blue fluid streaming from his fingers when he magnetized them.
The secret of this is closely analogous to the effect of brooding over sorrow : the mind of the patient is con- centrated on the spot to which the passes are directed ; and, as we know that disease can be excited thus by
MESMERISM. 40Q
imagination (especially in the hypochondriac), so it is a truth that this concentration may remove disease and pain, especially by the superaddition of faith.
ASTR. But the magnetizer, as they said, was not always in a state to operate, and required a certain training. So it was observed that Casper Mauser's cat did not follow him after he had eaten meat ; his mag- netic and somnambulant qualities were destroyed by animal food, although they were so abundant in his wilder state, — as his history will thus illustrate to those who believe it :
" As I came into the room, and the door of the de- ceased person was opened, which I did not know, I felt a sudden dragging on both sides of my breast, as if any one wished to pull me into the room. As I went on and proceeded towards the sick person, a very strong breath blew on me from behind, and the pulling which I felt before in my breast I now felt in my shoulders. I went towards the window ; the sick person followed me. At the time that I wished to ask a question of Mr. Von Gutter, I felt a trembling in my left foot, and it became unwell. She went back again, and that trem- bling left me. She seated herself under the canopy and said, ' Will not the gentleman sit down ?' Hereupon Mr. Professor Hensler said to her, she should see me. So as she drew nigh to me, within two or three steps, I was still more unwell than before, and I felt pains in all my limbs. Mr. Professor Hensler told her that I was the man who had been wounded (that is, by the attempt which had been made to assassinate him) ; at the same time she noticed my scar, and pointed towards it ; then came the air strong upon my forehead, and I felt pain in it, also my left foot began to tremble greatly. The sick person seated herself under the canopy, and said that she was ill ; and I also said that I was so unwell that I must sit down. I sat down in
410 MESMERISM.
the other room : now the other foot began to twitter. Although Mr. Von Gutter held my knees, I could not keep them still. Now a violent beating of my heart came on me, and there was a heat in all my body : that beating of the heart left me afterwards ; and I had a twittering in my left arm, which ceased after some minutes, and I was again something better. This con- dition lasted until the next morning, then I had a head- ache again and a twittering in all my limbs, still not so violent. In the afternoon, about three o'clock, it came again something less, and left me earlier ; then I was quite well again."
" The Somnambulist was greatly affected by the pre- sence of Hauser. I heard that, afterwards, when she was asleep, she had said these words, — l That was a hard struggle for me.' She felt indisposition from this process even on the next day."
Ev. The first sensation from magnetism is usually that of slight vertigo, — a state of musing or reverie suc- ceeding, the mind being lulled into abstraction, as it is by the rippling of water, the busy hum of bees, or the murmuring of the JEolian-harp. I would explain this feeling by the term, confusion of the senses ; for a cer- tain period must elapse ere an external object make an impression on the mind. When, therefore, objects or sounds become extremely rapid, the perception is con- fused, and the mind, left as it were to itself, cannot fol- low the impressions so as to associate them, and thus the magnetic ecstacy ensues.
ASTB. But Monsieur de Paysegur, who first excited magnetic somnambulism, magnetized trees and ropes, by which he converted those who clung to them into sleep- walkers. Dr. Elliotson, also, mesmerized a sovereign, by merely looking on it ; and a girl, who intuitively se- lected it from a heap of others, was instantly struck with coma.
MESMERISM. 411
Ev. The last is a very frail experiment. Paysegur often failed in his illustrations, and then the cunning juggler explained this, by affirming that the trees counter-magnetized each other. Now, whatever may be the influence imparted by this traction, the pheno- mena of excited somnambulism are similar precisely to those spontaneously occurring. Magnetic sleep, or ecstasis, is its precursor ; and there is a total uncon- sciousness of it when awake. Here is one of those close analogies that are the most potent arguments on which the question of magnetism rests. For, in all the states alluded to, the interval of ecstacy is a blank. And, as in the cases of intense alarm, as you remember, the mesmeric ecstacy will cause a sensitive girl to forget the present, while the scenes of youth and infancy pass vividly before her memory.
Now the effects of the passes of magnetism are re- ferred to six degrees, — the chief conditions being those of sleep, somnambulism, and clairvoyance. The essence of the last, it seems1, is combined with a blending of one's own feeling and nature with those of others ; — a reuniting, in fact, of body and soul once separated from that individual whole, which some philosophers, as Hecker, believed the whole human race to be. You observe my fidelity, Astrophel.
It must be confessed, that some of the experiments at which I have myself assisted exhibit very strange results. In some, there is the propensity to chatter nonsense, — a system of one form of hysteria, of which the analogy is perfect. One little jade created much amusement, by inserting supernumerary syllables, thus — opporwaytumwhatsty.
The insensibility of the nostril to the most powerful ammonia is a very imposing fact ; one which must strike us more than that of insensibility of the eye to light, or the ear to sound. For the faculty of perception may
412 MESMERISM.
be often suspended in either of those organs of sense, if attention be powerfully diverted to another point, or, as it is by the abstraction of magnetic ecstacy, not directed to any.
So that I do not wonder when thoughtless proselytes believe these effects to be miraculous, or credit the as- sertions of Pereaud, in his " Antidtemon of Mascon" that, — " The devil causeth witches to fall into ecstacies, so that a man would say their souls were out of their body." Or those of Bodin, in his " Theatre of Uni- versal Nature" that " those that are rapt of the devil feel neither stripes nor cuttings."
So that the honour of the magnetic monomania must at last be conceded to the fallen angel.
IDA. And are all these wonders worked only to excite curiosity ?
ASTR. I believe there is some good in it. Is it not certain, that during this state of magnetic sleep, opera- tions have been performed without creating pain ? The lady on whom Mons. Chopelain operated, talked coolly and unconsciously during its performance. And Jules Cloquet, in Paris, amputated the breast of a lady who had been put into an ecstacy or state of apathetic trance by a mesmerizer.
Ev. It is, I believe, quite true that she was perfectly unconscious of the operation. But even this is not safe. Pain is given us as a warning against extreme injury; that by our complaint or suffering, the sur- geon's mind may be on its guard. For the body is so far in disorder when it is chilled by this apathetic spell, that it may sink under fatal injuries, although they may be endured by the mind unconscious of its peril or its state. As a very curious antitype to these cases, it is stated in a medical gazette, that a young lady fell down in an hysterical fit and was insensible for two days. As a puffy swelling arose, she was trephined, but there
MESMERISM. 413
was no disease of the brain. In two days after this, she awoke and expressed all the steps of the operation, of which she had been painlessly sensible.
ASTR. And in this state of ecstasis, is there not strange havoc played with the senses, by their seeming displacement or transference ?
The philosophers will tell us that the ganglia in the abdomen become as it were little brains, and the plexusses and the nerves of the skin become, like those of the senses, capable of imparting the idea of visible objects to those ganglia and of rendering a slight whis- per distinctly audible. This is all very fine, and very material; but this straining at explanation is itself a proof of mystery. Van Ghest records the case of Made- moiselle B , a young lady who was magnetized : she
assured him that while she was intently looked upon, she felt her eyes and brain leave her head, and become fixed in her stomach, in which situation she saw acutely ; but if she was in the slightest degree disturbed, the eyes and their sense seemed to return to her head.
The stories recorded in the book of the Rev. Chauncey Townsend are not less curious than this.
Ev. Although I take the metaphysics of a divine with reservation, his facts may not be doubted. For there are other powerful impressions that will produce pheno- mena as curious. The arm of a young man in the " Ospidale della Vitta," at Bologna, in 1832, was grasped by a convulsive patient. Violent spasms succeeded, and he lost the senses of taste, smell, and sensibility of the skin, but he could hear if the voice was applied on the stomach ; and could, at that spot, discriminate be- tween different substances.
Another patient in the same hospital was subject every third day to violent convulsions, during the con- tinuance of which, he lost entirely the use of all his senses, and could neither hear, see, nor smell. His
414 MESMERISM.
hands also became so firmly clenched, that it would be impossible to open them without breaking the fingers. Nevertheless, Dr. Ciri, the physician under whose charge he was placed, discovered that the epigastric re- gion, at about two fingers breadth above the navel, received all the impressions of the senses, so as to replace them completely. If the patient was spoken to whilst the finger was placed on this spot, he gave an- swers, and even, when desired, opened his hands of his own accord. If any substance or matter was placed there, he could describe its form and quality, its colour and smell. As long as the finger was kept on the stomach, the convulsion gradually diminished until it entirely disappeared ; but if the finger were placed on the heart, the convulsion returned with increased vio- lence, and continued as long as the finger was kept in that position. If a flute was played while the finger was kept on the stomach, the patient heard the music ; but if the finger was taken away, and placed on the heart, and then taken back again to its former position, the man asked why they played by intervals ; yet the flute had never ceased. These experiments were all made in the presence of the professors and students of the hospital.
I will not counsel you, Astrophel, as to the extent of your belief in these strange tales, but extreme exaggera- tion often lessens the interest which scientific minds would take in these curiosities.
These pictures are correct in their outline, but the artists have not spared their colours. They will remind us, who are learned in legends, of that illusive mono- mania among the monks of Mount Athos, who believed that they could at pleasure attain a celestial vision by communing devoutly with the Deity, while their atten- tion or their sight were directed to the umbilicus ! And they were therefore called " Omphalopsychians." We
MESMERISM. 415
discover also very close analogies to this mental con- centration, in the acuteness with which one sense is endowed on the failure of another. The delicacy of touch in the blind is often extreme; I knew a blind lady who played an excellent rubber, passing her finger lightly over the card spots ; and more curious still are the cases of Miss M'Avoy, of Stanley the organist, and of Professor Saunderson. De Luc tells us of a lady, who read distinctly by passing her fingers over the page, even of a strange book. In Laura Bridgman, an American girl, an inmate of the Institution of Boston since 1837, the whole faculty of perception was concen- trated in the one sense of touch. At the age of two, sight, and hearing, and smelling, and almost taste, de- serted her. To this interesting creature, through the acuteness of her sense of touch in tracing letters, has been imparted so much knowledge, that the moral sentiments and the congenial affections of the heart are now beauti- fully displayed in her character. If by the dumb al- phabet, or finger-talking, conversation is commenced with her, she follows the fingers with her arm with extreme rapidity, so that scarce a letter escapes her. Such are the wonders of this child's intelligence, that her mind has been cited as illustrative of innate senti- ment; but the very facility is enough to explain her actions.
Le Cat writes of a blind sculptor at Voltera, who modelled features most faithfully by the touch.
A French gentleman lost the integrity of every sense, but sensation remained in half of his face, on which he received the correspondence of his friends by their tracing on it letters or forms.
In Mr. Eschke's establishment at Berlin, conversation was carried on by tracing letters on the clothes of the back.
A Bolognese, on witnessing a woman in acute hysteria,
416 MESMERISM.
became occasionally convulsed, and impenetrably deaf; if, however, the slightest whisper was breathed to the pit of the stomach, he heard distinctly.
From Andral's Lectures, to please you, Astrophel, I will select this fragment :
" I saw yesterday a young lady who has been fre- quently magnetized, and who, on my visit, presented some very remarkable circumstances. After a fit of in- digestion she fell into the ecstatic state, in which she continued when I saw her. Her skin was perfectly in- sensible, and her eyes were open like animals' in whom the fifth pair of nerves has been divided. She could perceive light, knew the difference between day and night for instance, but she could see and distinguish nothing else. She could not speak, but by signs ex- pressed that her intellect was unusually active. But the most remarkable of the phenomena she presented was a singular exaltation of the sense of hearing. So extraordinarily delicate had this become, that she dis- tinctly perceived sounds inaudible to myself and several other persons/'
Cams, unmindful of the existence of a state of ab- stract reverie resembling sleep, records the case of a young ecclesiastic, who composed sermons in a state of slumber, correcting and adding to them with peculiar care. And this is the deduction: that the sense of vision seemed to be transferred to the fingers, as the eyes were perfectly blinded to the writing paper. His eyes, when he sat for his portrait, should have been painted at the tips of his fingers.
James Mitchell, congenitally deaf and blind, discri- minated his friends from strangers, and even formed a fair estimate of character, by the smell of the parties. And there was a deaf woman (writes Le Cat) who could read, and even tell the difference of languages, from the silent motion of the lip.
MESMERISM. 417
From these very curious illustrations we may confess that these lines in Hudibras are no fiction :
" Communities of senses
To chop and change intelligences,
As Rosicrucian virtuosis
Can see with ears and hear with noses.'
For so strange are the synonymes of the senses, that the blind will express their notion of colour by sound; the tint of scarlet is like the sound of a trumpet. From this hint, probably, St. Amand, in the " Pilgrims of the Rhine," speaks of a visible music.
IDA. Do we not perceive, also, something of this acuteness in the sense of touch under certain other con- ditions ? In the story of Caspar Hauser, whether it be romance or reality, we read the following illustration of the effect of mineral traction :
" Once, when the physician, Dr. Osterhausen, and the royal crown fiscal, Brunner, from Munich, hap- pened to be present, Daumer led Caspar, in order to try him, to a table covered with an oil cloth, upon which lay a sheet of paper, and desired him to say whether any metal was under it. He moved his finger over it, and then said, ' There it draws.' ( But this time/ replied Daumer, * you are nevertheless mistaken, for/ with- drawing the paper, * nothing lies under it/ Caspar seemed at first to be somewhat embarrassed, but he put his finger again to the place where he thought he had felt the drawing, and assured them repeatedly that he there felt a drawing. The oil cloth was then removed, a stricter search was made, and a needle was actually found there."
Caspar Hauser might have felt this, or a cunning youth might have palmed on us his idea for a truth. Yet I confess Parkinson also relates the case of a
E e
418 CLAIRVOYANCE.
woman who fainted on the touch of a stethoscope, ex- claiming that it was " drawing her too strongly."
CAST. And of clairvoyance. Have you no incidents, Astrophel ?
ASTB. Many. Listen to the following fragments. One from Andral's Lectures :
" M. Feruss was present at the experiment. A watch was held behind the individual's head. ' I see/ said he, f something that shines.' ' What is it ?' ' A watch.' He was asked the hour, and replied exactly. Two different watches were tried. He was equally precise. The watches were taken out of the room, and the hands altered. He still told the hours and minutes expressed on the dials."
Another from an English newspaper, in 1833 :
" Mr. Barnaby ('twas at Bow-street) took his watch from his pocket, and said, 'What have I got in my hand ?' f A watch,' was the reply. — ' What is it made of?' ' Gold.' — at all,' said the boy : ' there is a riband to it.' — ' Can you tell at what hour the hand stands ?' ' Yes, at twelve.' Mr. B. showed his watch, and the hands were at twelve .precisely. Mr. B. then produced his purse from his pocket, and asked the boy the colour of it, and what it contained, and his answers were, without having the least opportunity of turning round towards the bench, that one end of the purse was brown, and the other yellow, and that the brown end contained sovereigns, and the yellow end silver. Mr. B. admitted the correctness of the description, and, taking some silver from his pocket, asked the boy to describe the different pieces. ' What is this ?' ' Sixpence,' said the boy, shilling, and dated 1816,' was the reply. And when the clerk brought forth another coin, and asked simi- lar questions, the boy said, eThat is a sixpence of the
MAGNETIC EOSTACY. 419
date of 1817;' and all these guesses proved to be cor- rect."
Townsend and Wood, at Antwerp and Paris, pro- duced this second sight in several instances. E. A., with eyes bandaged, read two hundred pages of print, and even written music.
Ev. A little more sifting of these cases, Astrophel, and they would resemble that of the cataleptic female of Amiens, related by Petelin; who also professed to tell the spots of a card, unseen by her. But it was dis- covered that the physician glided it beneath the bed- clothes. Or that told by Bertrand, of another ecstatic female : — " While lying entranced in a chamber illumi- nated by a candle, her ring was removed from her finger by Monsieur Bertrand, and given to a person standing near him. She was asked who had her ring, — fMr. Eyre has it in his trowsers pocket.' Mr. Bertrand ex- claimed that she was wrong, for it was not to Mr. Eyre the ring was given. The lady persisted in her state- ment, and, on immediate inquiry, it was found that the person who first was given the ring had secretly con- veyed it to Mr. Eyre."
The pages of history are not deficient in these pre- tensions to miracle. From Ulrick Zwingle we learn that Thomas Aquinas, the evangelical doctor, professed, by intense thought, to throw himself into ecstacy ; in which, strange visions and mysteries of another exist- ence passed before him.
Matthew Paris writes of a monk of Evesham, and of a certain Sir Owen, that, in one of these ecstacies, was favoured with an introduction into Saint Patrick's pur- gatory. So the mad visionary, Jacob Boehm, fell into many strange trances, and at last were revealed to him, — " The origin of nature ; the formation of all things ; and even divine principles and intelligent natures !"
But the case of Santa Theresa, if we can but believe E e 2
420 MAGNETIC ECSTACY.
the testimony of so accomplished an hypocrite, presents phenomena far more remarkable than all these. " Her frame was naturally delicate, her imagination lively, and her mind, incapable of being fixed by trivial objects, turned with avidity to those which religion offered, the moment they were presented to her view. But, unfor- tunately, meeting with the writings of Saint Jerome, she became enamoured of the monastic life, and, quit- ting the line for which nature designed her, she re- nounced the most endearing ties, and bound herself by the irrevocable vow. Deep melancholy then seized on her, and increased to such a degree, that for many days she lay both motionless and senseless, like one who is in a trance. Her tender frame, thus shaken, prepared her for ecstacies and visions, such as it might appear invidious to repeat, were they not related by herself and by her greatest admirers. She tells us that, in the fervour of her devotion, she not only became insensible to every thing around her, but that her body was often lifted up from the earth, although she endeavoured to resist the motion. And Bishop Yessen relates in parti- cular, that, when she was going to receive the Eucharist at Avila, she was raised in a rapture higher than the grate, through which, as is usual in nunneries, it was presented to her. She often heard the voice of God, when she was recovered from a trance ; but sometimes the devil, by imitation, endeavoured to deceive her, yet she was always able to detect the fraud."
So that Theresa's life was an elysium on earth, and she might well have cried out in her ecstacy, —
" sic sine vita,
Vivere quam suave est, sic sine morte mori."
Yet the modern proselytes to Mesmerism would scarcely believe this a fiction, but an illustration of that lucid vision which may, it is believed, be so highly ex-
MAGNETIC ECSTACY. 421
cited, as to associate the being with universal nature : a creed grounded on the expansion or illimitable nature of thought or mind, by which it seems to leave the body, carrying with it its consciousness.
So the disciples of Mesmer asserted, that, when they thought or spoke warmly of absent persons, they would both appear in their eidolon ; and also that they were, at that exact time, speaking or thinking of them. This was Shelley's conviction, that minds sympathetically im- parted ideas and thoughts, — particles, indeed, of the "mens divinior." So that they might well see in the dark.
Brown would be in a flood of joy to hear the affirma- tions of these ecstatics, whose spirits, as they believe and avow, are for the time released from the chains of mor- tality. " Why," exclaimed one of these half-spiritual- ized creatures, — " Why do you bring me again to life ? Would you depart from me, my body would grow cold, my soul would not return to it, and I should be happy."
ASTB. You are fond of caricature, Evelyn. I speak of sober truths only. I am told that the powers of acquirement may be so increased by magnetism, as to resemble new faculties. A lady, during a sort of ecstacy, sung most scientifically church music ; although, when awake, she entirely failed, and had forgotten all. And others will speak languages and sentiments, of which they are perfectly unconscious when awake.
There was a girl in the vicinity of Bedford Row, of whose case there are related similar wonders of this magnetically-imparted accomplishment ; and her beauty was so enchanting, as to transcend the brightest visions of Michael Angelo or Correggio.
Ev. Like that of the inspired somnambule, of whom Wolfart thus writes in his " Annals :" " An evil spirit ushered in her somnambulic sleep, and then a good
422 MAGNETIC INTUITION.
spirit spread its wings around her ; and when they had conversed, he flew with her to the Eternal City, through the sun and the moon ; and while there, tranced scenes were around her, and her spirit was enjoying her beati- tude : her face was like the face of a seraph, and no mortal painter might essay to trace its beauty." So say those who saw this mystery.
ASTR. Yet, as to the prophetic power imparted by magnetism, — cases are recorded by our enthusiastic proselytes, which throw the spells of the conjuror into an eclipse —
Ev. And therefore forbid belief. —
ASTR. — Even those displayed before our learned bodies. Madame Celini Sauvage, you remember, in the presence of the committee, in Paris, was placed in som- nambulism. Even while insensible to stimuli she formed, it is recorded, a correct judgment of the diseases of per- sons around her, especially in the person of M. Marc, one of the committee ; and in that of a young lady, on whom M. Dupuytren had operated for dropsy, and had tried the effects of the milk of a goat which had been anointed with mercury. Madame, unconscious of this, prescribed .the very same remedy. You remember the report, Evelyn.
Ev. I remember, but believe it not.
CAST. And is it thus with all our legends ? have you no more faith in your own order? There is the learned physician, Justin Kerner. You have not forgotten, As- trophel, his beautiful story of that most accomplished somnambule, the Prophetess of Prevorst, who seemed, as she said, to draw from the air a living principle, and whose very vitality, it was believed, was preserved by the magnetic influence. The body of this ethereal creature enfolded her spirit like a veil of film, — she was a very flower of light living on sun-beams. Her senses were lighted up by the minutest atom. A web of gossamer
FALLACY OF MESMERISM. 423
stung her waxen skin like a nettle. At the pale green light of a glow-worm, she fell into ecstatic sleep ; and then, (as to my own Tasso,) came to her spectral visit- ants, with whom she conversed, and whose colourless forms were visible even to her earthly companions. This fair creature had, as the story goes, been some time dead, when her mother made passes over her cold face and lips; and lo! her eyes opened, and a tremor was on her lip. Were I Astrophel, methinks I would make a pilgrimage to Lowenstein, where her body lies. And now, Evelyn, if you will, reprove me for my wild- ness, but confess there must be a sort of truth in legends so circumstantial as these.
Ev. A fair question, dearest Castaly. Yes, it is the crude or false interpretation of that sort of truth, a tran- sient glimpse it may be, of some embryo principle, that leads to popular error. A baseless theory is raised on an isolated fact ; and infantile science, bursting from its leading-strings ere it can crawl, topples headlong down the precipice, and splits on the rock of hypothetical presumption.
And then the confusion into which the mind is thrown by the definitions and conclusions of magnetizers, would make a very Babel of the fair field of philosophy. The least perplexing, perhaps, is that of the French savans who referred magnetism to the efforts of a fluid matter consisting of fire, air, and spirit, to preserve its equi- librium in certain bodies which were, as to their capa- city for this fluid, in a state of plus and minus. There is nothing very unphilosophical in this ; for the essence of magnetism is somewhat analogous to eccentric de- rangement of mind, a disturbance of that order or sym- metry among the faculties and actions, by which one is highly excited and another is comparatively passive. In a word, Mesmerism is true in part : it may induce catalepsy, somnambulism, exalted sensation, apathetic
424 ANALYSIS OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM.
insensibility, suspended circulation, even death. Clair- voyance and prophecy alone are the impositions as regards its effects, as the " blue flame" at the finger tips is of its nature.
One folly more. Mesmer himself vaunted to Dr. Von Ellikon, " twenty years ago I magnetized the sun ;" &c. so that the miracle of Joshua was but a stroke of mag- netism. Indeed, Richter, rector of the School of Dessau, affirms that all the miracles of the Testament were but the sequences of magnetic passes. And Kieser refers all to a " telluric spirit/' a sort of magic, of which the sun and moon are the grand reservoirs ; nay, this in- fluence is the real cause of sleep and waking.
IDA. So that we are mesmerized by the moon at night-fall, and unmesmerized by the sun at the opening of the dawn.
Ev. Then there were some aphorisms of Wolfart about fiddling to the viscera with his magnetic medicine, and working them up, as it were, to a jig or a bolero. These are the visions of a madman. But surely the illusion regarding this mysterious fluid is confessed in Dupotet's own notion of his own wondrous faculty, when he asserts his belief that animal magnetism is analogous to the royal touch, and the mysteries of Apollo, and ^Esculapius, and Isis, the miracles of Ves- pasian, and the Sibylline prophecies.
ASTR. You sneer at this as you did at the blue flame ; but Dupotet assures us that while he is magnetizing his patients, he feels a sensation at the points of his fingers resembling the aura from diffused electricity. Now is it not fair to ask if electro-magnetism may not reside in the animal as well as in the mineral, in man as well as in the torpedo and gymnotus. And why may there not be a condition of intercommunication or en rapport, a magnetic aura creeping through the nerves of each body?
ANALYSIS OF ANIMAL. MAGNETISM. 425
We should not, therefore, make any hasty decision against the presence of an aura streaming from the fingers and directed by the will. Monsieur Deleuze said, in Paris, " I do not know if this be material or spiritual, nor to what distance it is impelled ; but it is impelled and directed by my will, for if I cease to will, the influence instantly ceases."
I remember Priestly opined that phlogiston in our bodies produced electricity, which was destined for our own purposes merely. But as the silurus and the tor- pedo possess the power of imparting theirs, although at the expense of their animal power, I presume to think that concentrated mind may impart our own nervous influence to others.
Ev. I admire the acuteness of your question, Astro- phel ; but you are now come down from your clouds ; you are descending unawares to physiology. There are, doubtless, many peculiar states of the nervous system at present inexplicable. I grant it is possible that the influence of the nervous energy may become so eccentric as to illustrate the phenomena of magnetism, if, as some believe, this influence depends on a subtle fluid ana- logous to light, heat, and electricity ; the nerve convey- ing this fluid as the wire conducts the electric.
Thus an influence, which is apparently physical, may be, in reality, mental, for there is usually consciousness of the contact. M. Bertrand believed that the mind alone of the patient was acted on, and this is strength- ened by the experiments of the Abbe Faria, who pro- duced many of these phenomena by merely exclaiming to his sensitive visitors, " Dormez."
ASTR. Well, you are drawing the influences of mind and body very closely together, Evelyn. If animal magnetism be not the universal influence of sensitive beings, what is personal sympathy ?
Ev. It is not that mysterious freemasonry of the
426 ANALYSIS OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM.
senses which may impart a superhuman knowledge, or confer a power of personal recognition. Yet we are required to believe such stories.
ASTB. And are there not many well attested ? There was a Monsieur de la Tour Landrie, a nobleman of France, who so powerfully influenced a young shoe- maker by whom he was measured, that the youth fell into a senseless syncope, and profuse haemorrhage suc- ceeded it. This influence was repeated, and excited so deep an interest in the mind of the noble, that he in- stituted an inquiry regarding his birth and fortunes. And the result was, that Monsieur de la Tour discovered in the humble mechanic the son of his sister, the Baronne de Vesines.
The thrill of feeling with which the lover touches the Up of his mistress, the intense delight with which the mother presses her infant to her bosom, are illustrations of that power to which I allude. It is the magnetic touch of beauty which sends the fires of passion not only through the bounding heart of youth, but even through the icy veins of the stoic. " He that would preserve the liberty of his soul," said Socrates, " must abstain from kissing handsome people/' " What, then/' said Charmides, "must I be afraid of coming near a handsome woman ? Nevertheless, I remember very well, and I believe you do so too, Socrates, that being one day in company with Critobulus's beautiful sister, who resembles him so much, as we were searching together for a passage in some author, you held your head close to that beautiful virgin, and I thought you seemed to take pleasure in touching her naked shoulder with yours." " Good God !" replied Socrates, " I will tell you truly how I was punished for it for five days after. I thought I felt in my shoulder a certain tickling pain as if I had been bit by gnats, or pricked with nettles; and I must confess, too, that during all that
ANALYSIS OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM. 427
time I felt a certain hitherto unknown pain at ray heart."
Ev. So that "the crime," like that of Sir Peter Teazle, " carried its punishment along with it." But you must see that the mind of Socrates first appreciated beauty, ere this influence was imparted to him. Imagina- tion is not certainly idle here, yet I grant, that if the charm of substantial beauty or endearment be wanting, poesy will ever be but a cold and joyless sentiment.
ASTB. Then there is another mysterious sympathy, the fascination of the evil eye, or fascino. There were, both in Africa and in Illyria, writes Aulius Gellius, cer- tain families believed to possess the power of destroying trees, flowers, and children, and this by merely praising them ; and Plutarch and Pindar refer to the credence of the Greeks on this point, who were wont to invoke the Fate Nemesis against this fascination of an evil eye.
I think, too, traces of this credence may be found in Ovid, and Horace, and Pliny.
Ev. Yes, and in modern Italy the professors of the art are yet termed jettatori, or eye-throwers. But Val- letta, an Italian author, conscious of the truth, boldly disclaims for his countrymen the notion of demoniac influence, referring it to physical impression, somewhat resembling the fascination of the eye of the rattlesnake, that drops, as we are told, the bird from the branch into its mouth. In that exquisite sympathy between mind and body (the sequence of an influence on sensibility, or on the senses) consists the secret of all this.
You remember the effects of intense impression on the mind in the excitement of catalepsy, and indeed in causing instantaneous death: this is intense influence on the sensibility. The effects of deep impression on the sight or touch, by the passes of magnetism, are magnetic ecstacies : this is intense influence on the
428 INFLUENCE OF FAITH.
senses. So that all your mysteries are the result of this influence passing through the brain to the body ; and the vaunted miracles of Mesmer, and Bertrand, and Dupotet, are, as I have said, impositions, chiefly as regards the nature of their influence. And, like these, the doctrines of Fludd the Seeker, of the Abbe Nollet, of Lavater, of Nicetas the Jesuit, and the quaint ideas of many other visionaries, which you may read in their writings, are really explicable by the laws of physiology.
When the magnetiser asserts that a patient should possess a disposition to be acted on, he unwarily divulges his own secret; for this is nothing more than blind faith in a promise. And this credulity is most charac- teristic of that disordered condition of a nerve, acute sensibility, in which the slightest causes may effect a seeming wonder. Nay, even disease and death were so induced during the manipulations of Hensler and Emmelin.
This also is the secret of that influence imparted by the touch of a seventh son ; or of the hand of a criminal hanging on the gallows ; or the revolting precept of Pliny, that an epileptic should drink the blood of a dying gladiator, as it gushes from his wound ; or the stroking of Valentine Greatrex ; the sympathetic powder of Sir Kenelm Digby ; the tractors of Perkins ; of chi- romancy, rhabdomancy, and of other curiosities recorded in tracts and journals.
In my professional life, I have seen the same in- fluence, though infinitely less in degree, imparted by an implicit confidence in the blessings of our science. Even Bertrand honestly confesses its power.
A lady was thrown into deep sleep by the touch of a magnet, sent by him in an handkerchief from the dis- tance of three hundred miles. But the same effect was produced by the contact of unmagnetized cambric ; and Bertrand allows, that where an ignorance of his inten-
INFLUENCE OF FAITH. 429
tion existed, even the magnetized talisman was powerless over his patient.
I could tell you tales of bits of wood effecting all the wonders of the metallic tractors of Perkins ; and cubes of lead, and those of nickel, fraught, as a learned doctor had declared, with magnetic virtues ; but I spare you.
From this superstitious faith spring also the miracles of that pious saint, who had assumed the staff of Saint Francis Xavier, the Prince Hohenlohe. One of these was the cure of Miss O'Connor, attested by Dr. Bad- deley, of Chelmsford, who had tried in vain to relieve the lady of acute neuralgia. She was directed to pro- strate herself at the altar in Chelmsford at the moment when the sainted prince would kneel at his shrine in the cathedral of Bamberg. At the appointed time, during the solemn celebration of high mass, as she ex- claimed, " Thy will be done, O Lord," the agonizing limb was painless.
I do not doubt the possibility of such an incident. And here is the unfolding of another secret of these German magnetizers, who were believed to shoot at their patients with the unerring aim of a rifle, even though many miles might intervene. Nadler, as we are told in the " Asclepeion," was so good a shot, that he brought a woman to the ground at the moment he fixed his magnetic aura at her, aiming between the eyes and the bosom, even at the distance of eighteen miles.
I am aware that this, my philosophy, would not pass current at the Vatican, for "the congregation of the holy office, having once applied to the pope, to know if animal magnetism were lawful, and if penitents might be permitted to be operated on ; his holiness replied, that the application of principles and means purely physical to things and effects which are supernatural, for the purpose of explaining them physically, is nothing but an unlawful and heretical deception."
430 INFLUEXCE OF FAITH.

But I may tell you that his holiness himself was once a great monopolist of saints' cures, if we may believe a book, printed by Roberts, in London, in 1605, entitled, " A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to withdraw the hearts of religious men, under pretence of casting out devils ; practised by Father Edmunds, alias Weston, a Jesuite, and divers Romish priests his wicked associates."
And, moreover, the interference of priests has often led to the interdiction of protestants, in their scientific ministering to disease the most severe, as typhus fever, or surgical operations, because they were heretics ; while the profane Paracelsus says, " It matters not, by God or devil, so he be cured ;" even without an indulgence, I presume, from Delia Genga, or the leave of the sacred college.
Believe me, the influence of faith will illustrate all this mystery, and reduce even these impostures to a simple truth. Without it, only the grossest supersti- tion would believe that sympathy would thus ' ' take the wings of the morning," and impart to a mind that was thinking at our antipodes a consciousness of our own sentiments; for this would be a revival of that blind credulity, which in the darker ages was reposed in the superhuman agency of magic and of witchcraft.
SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.
" She was a charmer, and cou'd almost read The thoughts of people." OTHELLO.
IDA. As you unfold the wonders of the mind, Evelyn, the secrets of many splendid mysteries shine forth in the light of your truth ; and the wisdom of " charmed rings," "blessed brambles/' and amulets and talis- mans, fades before the precepts of a purer faith. Yet is there no witchcraft in your philosophy ? You have, methinks, absolved Astrophel from spells and dark hours, for, in the softened lustre of his eye I see a light more holy than its wonted flash of divination.
CAST. You have more faith in his conversion than I have, Ida ; for, lo ye now ! On a mossy stone in Tin- tern lay this sable velvet pouch, which, from its mystic 'broidery, might be the lost treasure of a Rosicrucian cabalist.
" There's magic in the web of it ; A sibyl that had number'd in the world The sun to make two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sew'd the work."
And here is a scroll of vellum folded within it. Listen,
432 SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.
and you shall hear the pencillings of some unhappy student, benighted in the mazes of the Cabala.
" The eye of modern philosophy may wink at the wisdom of occidt sciences, and sorcerers and magicians, necromancers and Rosicrucians, cabalists and conjurers, astrologers and soothsayers, Philomaths, Drows, and Oreadesy wizards and witches, and warlocks, and sibyls and gipsies, may be, in its estimation, a mere legion of cyphers. Yet faith hath been long and firmly lavished on the art of divination by the learned and mighty men of all ages. The Chaldean, who read the stars, was the coryphaeus and the type of superhuman knowledge; the magi of Persia and Egypt, and other orient lands, followed in his wake. The venerable Hermes Trisme- gistus was surrounded by his proselytes in the year of the wrorld 2076; and Apollonius and Zoroaster, and Pythagoras, and, in later ages, John of Leyden, Roger Bacon, and other learned mystagogues, have imbibed a more than mortal wisdom from the aspect of those starry lights which gem the vaulted firmament ; while the luminous schools of Padua, and Seville, and Sala- manca, were rich in the records of occult and mystic learning. Emperors and kings, and ministers, who ruled the destiny of mighty nations, have believed. Wallenstein was all confiding ; Richelieu and Mazarin (as Morin writes) retained soothsayers as a part of their household; Napoleon studied with implicit faith his book of fate ; and Canute, obedient to his confidence in the virtue of relics, directed his Roman agent to buy St. Augustine's arms for one hundred silver talents, and one of gold.
" Nay, what saith divinity itself? Glanvil, the chap- lain of King Charles II., affirms in his ' Saducismus Triumphatus/ that ' the disbeliever in a witch must believe the devil gratis ;' and Wesley said, that ' giving up witchcraft was, in fact, giving up the Bible/ Now,
SIBYLMNE INFLUENCE. l.i i
as the Chaldean sophs were divided into three classes — 1 . the ' Ascaphim,' or charmer; 2. the or magician ; 3. the ' Chasdim/ or astrologer ; so the legion of modern witches was composed of a mystic tryad, distinguished by colours that were a symbol of their influence on our mortal frame. The black witch could hurt, but not help ; the white could help, but not hurt ; the grey could both help and hurt."
IDA. My own Castaly, have pity on us. Evelyn may unrol the coils of this unholy manuscript if he will.
I do believe this lettered clerk has, in some unhappy hour, wandered by the ruins of the Seven Churches in the valley of Glendalough ; and there, creeping up to St. Keven's bed, that hangs over the gloomy waters of its lake, has won the fatal gift of Catholic magic. Or perchance he has sworn allegiance with Faust and Friar Bacon.
ASTR. If an Oxford student must kneel at the shrine of a fair lady, he will whisper this confession. In ex- ploring the treasures of black-letter romance, he revelled among the occult mysteries, slighting that pure analysis of nature which is the essence of all philosophy. The legends of Reginald Scott, De Foe, Glanvil, and Wanley, were the companions of his pillow ; and thus in poring over the legends of enchantment, he was him- self enchanted, and contemplated a wondrous history of witchcraft, where Sir Walter himself had failed. Let me have light penance, and I promise in the simple and beautiful light of nature alone to read her wonders ; and if I dare, to study astrology in those planet eyes which look so mildly on their proselyte.
IDA. Or rather, as the magi of old, you will burn your books of divination ; and, like Friar Bacon, who broke the rare glass which showed him things fifty miles off, you will study divinity, and become a pious anchorite.
Ff
434 SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.
CAST. I am happy that you abandon the dark and dooming spells of the magus and the witch, Astrophel, for witchcraft is the unholy opposition of a demon to the Deity. Yet in your fate I read my own. But cen- sure not the poetry of that innocent romance that lights up the legends of the berry-brown sibyl, whether she be a tirauna prowling in the streets of Madrid, or a gipsy perched upon the heath-brow of Norwood ; for theirs are happy prophecies. Yet if, like Astrophel, I am to be the slave of philosophy, let me at least make " a dying and a swan-like end."
It was among the heath-valleys, where nature lay in wild repose around the place of my birth, that I first met the glance of a gipsy's eye. On the northern side of that beautiful sandhill in Surrey, that rears its purple and turret-crowned crest between the chalk hills and the weald, there is a green and bosky glen, the " Valley Lonesome." Along the waste of Broadmoor, that spreads between the brow of Leith-Hill and the Roman camp of Anstie-bury, comes rippling down the crystal streamlet of the Till, which, blending with a torrent that leaps from a lofty sand-rock, steals away amid mosses and .cardamines, and cuckoo-flowers ; now glid- ing between its emerald banks, now swelling into a broader sheet, beneath the beech woods of Wotton, the ancient seat of the Evelyns. There the willows dip their silver blossoms, and the violet, almost hidden be- neath them, fills the air with sweetness. There the wild briar wreaths in light festoons its tiny roses, and the passion-flower, entwining its luxuriant tendrils around the aspen and the sycamore, hangs its beautiful blue stars in rich profusion. And there, among the boughs of lofty elms whose shadows in the early morning darken the casements of Tillingbourne, a colony of rooks hang their woody nests ; and the murmurs of the ringdove, nestling within the woods of Wotton and the Rookery,
SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE. 435
are heard in the golden noon and sunset of June, float- ing around this leafy paradise.
It was on such an eve that my thoughts had faded into slumber ; and when my eyelids oped, there was a form of embrowned beauty before me so wild, yet so majestic, that Cleopatra, in the garb of an Egyptian slave-girl, might have stolen upon my sleep : so scant of clothing, so lovely of form and feature, she was like an almond-flower upon a leafless branch. Her expression was full of beautiful contrasts, for, while her eaglet eye went into my being, there was a languid smile on her ruddy lip, as she were about to syllable my own destiny ; and, indeed, she did unfold to me many things which have been most strangely worked out and verified in my life. I wept at some of these foretellings, and she said, " Tears were the pearls that gem the rose-leaves of life." I smiled at others, and she said, " Smiles were the sun- light that warmed their swelling leaflets into beauty."
Throughout that summer night, when all were sleep- ing, save two romantic girls, she unfolded to me the secrets of her tribe, and a mine of mysteries learned from a Bohemian Maugrabee. She told me how, and why, the Druids, when the moon was six days old, cut the misseltoe with a golden knife ; how the vervain was gathered with the left hand, at the rising of the dog- star ; and the lunaria was valueless, if not picked by moonlight ; how the roan-wood, and the Banyan seed- ling, and the four-leaved shamrock, bore a charm in their tender leaves against every ill of life. In nature, she said, there is no bane without its antidote, were the intellect of man ripe for its discovery. There are corals and green jaspers, carved into the forms of dragons and lizards, hung round an infant's neck, for the cure of an ague ; the crimson-spotted heliotropium, to staunch a flow of blood ; a wrapper of scarlet-cloth, to mitigate the virulence of small-pox ; the blue-flannel, nine times Ff2
43G SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.
dyed, to allay the pains of rheumatism ; and the magic word Abracadabra, to sooth the disorders of a nerve. And, above all, that wondrous weapon-salve of sympathy, which once healed on the instant the wound of Ulysses, and that which the dainty Ariel gave to Miranda, to charm Hippolito to life and health ; and that with which the lady of Branxholme salved the broken lance, when William of Deloraine was healed.
It will be long ere from my memory fade this vision of Charlotte Stanley. In pity, Evelyn, leave me this one romance of my young life, — the sheet and taper, nay, the ducking-stool for the witch, if you will, but deign to bestow one smile upon the gipsies.
Remember the story of the Sibylline Tables. If Sextus Tarquin had not frowned on the Roman gipsy, she had not burned six of those precious volumes, which, from the massive cabinets of stone made to en- close the three that were preserved, prove that the Roman thought them priceless. One smile, Evelyn, for my sibyl.
Ev. Not in memory of the Sibylline Tables, but for your own sake, dear Castaly. Although the innocence of your nut-brown sibyl is not so clear, and I am some- what jealous, too, of that white magic of hers, which hath won the belief of so many minds the reverse of illiterate, who, from the Chaldean even to Bacon and William Lilly, have spurned philosophy, and even divi- nity, and pinned their faith upon a gipsy's sleeve, and doted on the inspiration of an astrologer.
IDA. Forgetful, it would seem, that the wicked king of Babylon found the devout Daniel, and Hananiah, and Michael, and Azariah, ten times better than all his magi and astrologers.
These are the antiquaries who possess the last relic of the true cross ; or the last morsel of Shakspere's mulberry, of which last bit there may be about ten
SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE. 437
thousand ; such are they who would pen learned theses on the disputed place of sepulture of St. Denys, and determine the question, too, although one of his heads is in the cathedral of Bamberg, another in the church of Saint Vitus in the castle of Prague ; one of his hands in a chapel at Munich ; one of his bodies, minus one hand, in the keeping of the monks of Saint Emmeram at Regensberg ; while the monks of Saint Denys pos- sess another, his head being preserved in the third shrine of the treasury in their cathedral. These may be innocent follies, but superstition, alas ! will not always stop here ; fanaticism soon descends to self- infliction, or to cruelty, and in that moment it becomes a black stain on the heart of man. Yet, even for the tortures of the Inquisition (so exquisite, that we might believe them the suggestions of a devil), the Jesuit, Macedo, has put forth this profane justification : that the bloody tribunal was first instituted by the Deity, in the condemnation of Cain and the bricklayers of Babel.
Ev. Such was the trial of ordeal instituted for the test of innocence. Among the Anglo-Saxons, as all the chronicles of their history will show, this mode of trial prevailed ; as in the ordeals of the Cross, of boiling water and of the hot iron ; of cold water, or drowning ; and of the corsned, or consecrated cake. Equally savage was the trial for murder, so prevalent in Scot- land, especially the institution of their Bahr-recht, or " Right of the bier." Among the " decisions" of Lord Fountainhall, you may read of legends almost incredi- ble. Philip, the son of Sir James Standfield, was exe- cuted because, in lifting the corpse of his murdered father from its bier, blood welled forth from his wound ; and the Laird of Auchindrane was tortured, because a corpse chanced to bleed on the approach of a little girl, who, I believe, was merely one of his domestics.
438 SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.
But waving these profanations, the reliques of a darker age, let me have a word with Astrophel on part- ing. The seeming fulfilment of many a sibylline pro- phecy is perfectly clear as to its source. There may be coincidence, as in the dream ; or faith and inducement may impart an energy of action, which may itself work a wonder, or accomplish that end which is referred to a special power.
At the siege of Breda, in 1625, when fatigue and abstinence had well nigh reduced the garrison to pro- stration and despair, the Prince of Orange practised this pious fraud on his soldiers : — He pretended to have obtained a charmed liquor, so concentrated, that (on the principles of homoeopathy) four drops would satu- rate a gallon of water with restorative virtues ; and with so much skill was this administered by the physicians, that a general restoration was speedily effected.
You remember, Astrophel, the temptation of Diocle- tian. From Flavius Vopiscus we learn, that he was paying the Druidess of Brabant, with whom he lodged. (f When I am emperor," he said, " I will be more gene- rous." " Nay," said the Druidess, " you shall be em- peror, when you have killed the BOAR." He hunted and killed boars incessantly, but the purple was not offered to him. At length, the Emperor Numerianus was mur- dered by Arrius Aper. This was the eventful moment, and, transfixing the heart of Aper with his sword, he said, " I have slain the boar !" and the imperial crown was his.
Is not this, too, the counterpart of that seeming pro- phecy of the Weird Sisters, which made Macbeth a murderer and a king ?
There was an enchanted stone at Scone, in Scotland, the palladium of Scottish liberty, for it was believed that the lord of that spot on which the stone lay, should bear sovereign sway. King Edward bore this talisman
6
SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE. 439
away in triumph ; and Scotland, depressed by its loss, became a vassal of the English crown.
And this faith may invest the merest trifle with a spell. Sir Matthew Hale was presiding in his court on the trial of a witch. She had cured many diseases by a charm in her possession; and the evidence seemed conclusive of her guilt. But when the judge himself looked on this charm, behold ! it was a scrap of paper, inscribed with a Latin sentence, which, in default of money, he himself, while on the circuit, had given many years before, in a merry mood, to mine host, by way of reckoning.
Among the many analogies to this story in ancient times, there was the potent poison-charm or antidote of Mithridates, King of Pontus. Its effect was supreme. And what its composition ? twenty leaves of rue, one grain of salt, two nuts, and two dried figs !
Now you will remember that the wizard and the ministers of these charms, even among savages, were also their physicians, and, among pagans and papists, their priests. It is clear that the sensitiveness of mind and body under disease, when the first were consulted, and under the influence of superstitious fear, instilled by the priesthood, rendered them impressible to the most trifling causes.
Even in minds of superior natural energy, from the instilment of superstitious ideas in infancy, a blind faith will often become paramount. Such a mind, and so influenced, was Byron's; and on such a faith he once stole an agate bead from a lady, who had told him it was an antidote to love. It failed : had it not, Byron might have been a happier man; but the world would have been 'reft of poesy, the brightest, yet the darkest, that ever flashed on the heart and mind of man.
Sir Humphrey Davy, you may recollect, "knew a
440 SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.
man of very high dignity, who never went out shooting without a bittern's claw fastened to his button-hole by a riband, which he thought ensured him good luck/'
To illustrate the innocence of your gipsy, Castaly, hear this story.
"About forty years ago, a young lady, afterwards
Mrs. W , rallied her companions aloud for listening
to the predictions of an itinerant gipsy, when the latter malignantly threatened her to beware of her first con- finement. She was shortly afterwards married ; and, as the period of her peril approached, it became evident to her friends that the remembrance of the wizard maledic- tion began to fasten upon her spirits. She survived her time only a few days : and the medical attendants, who were men of eminence, stated it as their opinion, that mental prepossession alone could be admitted as the cause of her death ; not one unfavourable circum- stance having occurred to explain it.
" And some melancholy illusion of this nature induced fatality in the case of another lady, (Mrs. S.) who, ac- cording to the statement of the venerable Mr. Cline, reluctantly submitted to the removal of a small tumour hi her breast. Unexpectedly, and without any apparent cause, she died, on the morning following the operation. It was then for the first time ascertained that she had prognosticated her death, and the impression that she should not survive had taken so strong a possession of her mind, that her minutest household arrangements were preconcerted, as appeared by the papers found in her cabinet."
I believe that many modern instances of gradual and almost imperceptible decay, may be referred to the in- fluence both of melancholy prophecies and visions on the mind, although their agency may be unsuspected, and as obscure as that of the poisonous herbs of the
SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE. 441
Thcssalinn Erichtho, or the sorceress of Neapolis, or the aqua tofana of the Italians.
And superstitious fear may induce a sudden death. Alfred, a nobleman, was one of the conspirators against the Saxon Athelstan. To justify himself from the accu- sation, he went to Rome, that he might make oath of his innocence before John, the pope. On the instant he took the oath he was convulsed, and, in three days, died.
Then as to the language of the stars : — as the phreno- logist is much indebted to the principles of Lavater in forming his estimate of character, so I believe of the astrologer. The aspect of the face is not always dis- regarded in his prophecy, while he seems to observe only the aspect of the stars. And although there is often a very strange precision in his guesses, yet there was once a curious incident in my own presence, from which we may learn something of this secret. On a visit to a learned astrologer, (who might rest his fame on another art in which he is so eminent,) our fortunes, past and future, were told with extreme minuteness, and, I con- fess, with many coincidences of former times. One was reminded by the seer of a state of deprivation which he endured in the year 18 — , in the Mediterranean. The officer remembered in that year being becalmed in a voyage to Malta, and, under a sultry sky with parching thirst, enduring the want of water for many days. This was conclusive of the fidelity of the planets, until we discovered that the horoscope was imperfect, for the officer had given to the astrologer the urrong date of his birth.
CAST. And this, sir, is your Philosophy of Mystery ? Oh for the forethought of my sibyl, that I might learn my own fate for listening to this treason against the throne of fancy, on the steps of which I have so long offered up my homage — this ruthless spoliation of her dreamy kingdom !
442 SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.
Ev. Let me for once play the sibyl, fair Castaly, and whisper the penalty in your ear
IDA. A lesson in natural philosophy ; and the apt scholar, as I read it on her cheek, has in a moment learned it all by heart; o'ershadowing all her bright visions of earth and its romances.
Ev. What marvel that a daughter of earth should be so apt in its philosophy ? —
" For half her thoughts were of its sun, And half were of its show'rs."
But it is not so easy to shake the throne of fancy, or to lay the genius of romance. He will ever wave his wand of enchantment over the human mind. The poet will still build his air-castles, and the ghost-seer indulge in his wild visions of nonentity.
The wonders of creation will still affect us, according to the quality of intellect or genius, or the constitution or cultivation of the mind. The poor Indian will still " see God in clouds, and hear him in the wind," and the untutored rustic be startled by the shadow of a shade. To him the slightest change in the regular course of nature will still be a special miracle : thunder, the awful voice of Divine reproof; lightning, the flashes of Divine displeasure ; the scintillations of the aurora, the spectral forms of contending armies ; and the comet foretel the wreck of mighty empires. Against this un- tutored devotion I would not breathe a thought, — it is the voice of the Deity speaking to the savage.
But it is the privilege, the duty of intellect, to think more deeply of the physiology of nature ; and to learn from the physical sciences, its real utility in the grand scheme of the creation.
Philosophy, rising from the sublime study of these beautiful phenomena, regards them as the pure effect of those elemental laws, by which the integrity of the
SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE. 443
universe is preserved. And what ought this philosophy to teach us ? Not the superstition of the bigot — for the age of special miracles is, for the present, past ; not the pride of the fatalist, who refers all to chance and neces- sity ; not the mania of the astrologer, who plumes him- self on his prophetic wisdom, and presumes to interpret to the letter the mysterious voice of his Creator ; but that true wisdom, which threw over Boyle, and Locke, and Newton, the mantle of humility and devotion.
The autumn floods had descended from the moun- tains of Gwent; the banks of the meandering Wye were desolate, and her woods leafless ; yet the Abbey of Tintern was still majestic and unchanged.
It had been decided, that when the summer sun shone again on Wyndcliif, the wanderers should revisit the beautiful valleys that lay beneath it, in memory of happy hours ; but ere this was fulfilled, changes manifold had come over their destiny, from which might be fashioned a true love-story.
For Astrophel, Ida had unconsciously worked a spell of natural witchcraft, and his wild thoughts were ever chastened by the pure light of her devotion. And Evelyn almost confessed to Castaly, that there might be a sort of animal magnetism. He has neglected the study of the atomic theory, for the contemplation of the animated atoms that play around his domestic hearth ; and the heart and life of Castaly, a poetry in themselves, have since interwoven many a blushing flower on the classic pages of his philosophy.
THE END.
LONDON :
GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, PRINTERS, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.
KY THE SAME AUTHOR.
PRACTICAL REMARKS ON
THE DISEASES OF THE SKIN,
ON THE
EXTERNAL SIGNS OF DISORDER,
AND ON THE CONSTITUTIONAL PECULIARITIES DURING INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD.
" Much useful information conveyed in very few words." — Lancet.
" Mr. Dendy has drawn from his opportunities, as Surgeon to the Royal Infirmary, valuable materials for various disquisitions on the diseases of infancy." — British and Foreign Medical Quarterly Renew.
8vo. Price 6s. 6d.
THE BOOK OF THE NURSERY.
PRECEPTS FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF INFANTS,
AND FOR THE PREVENTION AND DOMESTIC TREATMENT OF THE DISEASES INCIDENTAL TO CHILDHOOD.
" All should study this book, and instal it in their nurseries." — Metro- politan Magazine.
" Mr. Dendy has done valuable service to the rising generation." — Literary Gazette.
NEW WORKS
IN
MISCELLANEOUS & GENERAL LITERATURE
PUBLISHED BY
MESSRS. LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS,
PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
Cla&iffrt Jnfcejr,
Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
Loudon's Self-Instruction . ^17°
History and Criticitm.
Pages. Bavldon On valuing Rents, &c. - 3
Lady's Companion - 17 Amateur Gardener - 17
Pa«*«
Bell's History of RnasU - - U
Crocker's Land-Surveying - - 7 Johnson's Farmer's Encyclopaedia 14 Loudon's Agriculture - - - 17 " Self-Instruction - -17 " Lady's Country Compan. 17 Low's Elements of Agriculture - 18 " On Landed Property - - 18 " On the Domesticated Animals 18 Thomson On Fattening Cattle - SO
Maunder's Treasury of Knowledge 20 Biographical Treasury 20 Scientific Treasury - 30 Treasury of History - 30 " Natural History - -20 Parkes's Domestic Duties - .23 Pocket and the Stud - * • 10 Pycroft's English Reading . .34 " Collegian's Guide - .34 Reader's Timetables - . .34
Blair's Chron. and Histor. Tables - 4 Bloomfield's Edition of Thacydidee 4 Bun-en's Ancient Egypt . . 6 Coad 's Memorandum' . . . « Cooley. History of Wscowry - U Conybeare and Howtoa's St. Paml • Crowe's History of Franc* - - 16 De Sismondi's Fall of RomanEmptn 16 " Italian Republics - 16 Dunham's Spain and Portugal * 16
Reece's Medical Guide - -25
Middle An* - . U
Rich's Comp. to Latin Dictionary 28
" German Empire - - 16
Riddle's Latin Dictionaries - - 28
" Denmark, Sweden, *e. 16
Arts and Manufactures.
Robinson's Curing, Pickling, &c. 28 " British Wines - - 38
" Poland - - - 16 Dunlop's History of Fiction -
Rowton'a Debater - ... 26
Eastlake's History of Oil Painting •
Baker's Railway Engineering 3 Ball on Manufacture of Tea - 3
Eccleston's English Antiquities - 8 Fergus's United State* - U
Thomson On the Sick Room - -30
Bourne's Catechism of the Steam
Thomson's Interest Tables - -SO
Fergusson On Art - - - - »
Engine .... 4 Brande's Dictionary of Science.&c 5
Webster's Domestic Economy * 83
Foss's English Judge* ...» Poster's European Literature - 19
Budge's Miner's Guide - 8
Gibbon's Roman Empire - - 19
Cresy's Civil Engineering - 7 D'Apincourt's History of Art 23
Botany and Gardening.
Grant's Memoir A Correspondent* 10 Grattan's Netherlands - - - l«
Dresden Gallery - - - 8 Ea-stlake On Oil Painting - 8 Evans's Sugar-Planter's Manual 9
Ball On the Cultivation of Tea - 3 Callcott's Scripture Herbal - 6
llarriiwn On the English Language 10 Haydon On Painting and Design. 11 Head's Memoirs of Cardinal Pace* 11
Fergusson On Architecture, Ac. 9
Conversations on Botany 6
Humphreys' Black Prince - - 13
Gwut's Encyclop. of Architecture 10
Evans's Sugar-Planter's Manual - 9
Jeffrey's (Lord) Contributions - U
Hayrion On Painting and Design - 11 Holland's Manufactures in Metal - 16
Henslow's Botany - ... 16 HoareOn Cultivation of the Vine - 11
Keightley's Outlines of History - 16 Kemble's Anglo-Saxons - 14
Humphrevs' Illuminated Books - 13
" On the Roots of Tines - 11
Macaulay's C'fit. and Hist. Essays 18
Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art 13 London's Rural Architecture - 18
Hooker's British Flora - - - 11 " Guide to Kew Gardens . 1 1
History of England - 16 Mackintosh's Miscellaneous Works 18
Moseley's Engineering - - - 17 Porter's Manufacture of Silk - - 16 " " Porcelain ft Glass 16
Lindley's Theory of Horticulture - 15 " Introduction to Botany - IS " Svnopsis of British Flora 16
" History of EngUnd - 16 M'CulIoch'.GenjrrsphicalDictiouarj 1- Maunder's Treasury of History - 3O
Scoflern On Sujar Manufacture - 26
Loudon's Hortus Britannicus - 18
Merivale's History of Rome - - 20
Steam Engine, by the Artisan Club 3
" " Lignosis Londinensis 18
Milner's Church History - - 30
Twining On Painting - - - 31
" Amateur Gardener - 17
Moore's History of Ireland - - 16
Ure's Dictionary of Arts, &c. * 81
" Self-Instruction - 17
Mosbeim's Ecclesiastical History 22
•• Tree* and Shrubs - - 17
Mure's Ancient Greece - 31
" Gardening - - - 17 " Plants - 17
Nicolas's Chronology of History - 16 Passages from Modern History - 28
Rivera's Rose Amateur's Guide - 2S
Ranke's History of the Reformation 24
Biography.
Rogera's Vegetable Cultivator - 26 Schleiden's Botany, by Lankester 26
Rich's Comp. to Latin Dictionary 25 Puddle's Latin Dictionaries - - 35
Bell's Eminent British Poet* - 16
Rogers'* Essiys from the Edinburgh
Collins's Life of Collins - - 6
Dunham's Early British Writers - 16 " LivesofBritishDramatisU16 Forster's Statesmen - - - 16
Chronology.
Russell's Bedford Correspondence 4 Scott's History of Scotland - 16
Foss's English Judges - - . 9 Gleig's Military Commanders - 16
Allen On Prerogative ... 3
Blair's Chronological Tables - 4
Smith's St. Paul - - 38 " (S.) Lects. on Moral Philo-
Grant's Memoir & Correspondence 10 Heart s Memoirs of Cardinal Pacca 1 1
Bnneen's Ancient Egypt - - S Nicolas's Chronology of History - 16
sophy - • 28 Soarors' Latin Church - - 38 Southey's The Doctor, Ac. - - 38
Humphreys's Black Prince - - 13 James's Foreign Statesmen - - 16 Kindersley's De Bayard - - 14 Leslie's Life of Constable - - 15
Commerce^ Mercantile Affain.
Stebbing's History of the Church- 16 " History of Reformation 16 Stephen's Church of Scotland - 29 " (Sir J.) Essays - -29
Maunder's Biographical Treasury- 20 Roscoe's British Lawyers - - 16
Banfield and Weld's Statistics * 3
Switzerland, History of - - - IS Sydney Smith's Works ... 38
1 Russell's Bedford Correspondence 4
Gilbart's Treatise on Banking . 9
Shelley's LiteraryMen of Italy, 4c. 16 " French Writers - - 16
Gray's Tables of Life Contingencies 10 Lorimer's Letters to a Young
Thirlwall's History of Greece - 30 Tooke's History of Prices - - 30
Southey's British Admirals * - 16 " Life of Wesley - - 29 " Life and Correspondence 29 Stephen's Ecclesiastical Biography 29
Master Mariner - ... 17 M'Culloch'sCommerce A Navigation IS Reader's Time Tables ... 24 Steel's Shipmaster's Assistant - 29
Townsend's State Trials - .81
Twining'* Philosophy of Painting- SI
Taylor's Loyola - - - - 30
Thomson's Interest Tables - - 30
Townsend's Eminent Judges - 31
Walford's Customs' Laws - - SI
Juvenile Bo.*kt.
Water ton's Autobiography & Essays 31
Amy Herbert - 34
Earl's Daughter (The) - 36
Geography and Atlutet.
Gertrude - - - 36 Howitt's Bov-s Country Book - 12
Books of General Utility
Butler's Geography and Atlases * 6 De Stnelecki's New South Wales - 7
(Mary) Children's Tear - 13 I.anetim Parsonage - - 36 Mrs. M .reefs Conversations- - 1*
Erman's Travels through Siberia - 8
Margaret Percival - - - - »
Acton's Cookery S Black's Treatise on Brewing - - 4 Cabinet Lawyer .... 6 Donovan's Domestic Economy - 18
Forster's Geography of Arabia - 9 Hall's Large Library Atlas - - 10 " Railway Map of England - 10 Johnston's General Gazetteer - 14
Matryat's Mastennaa Read* . . IB • Mission - ... |t " SetUen in Canada • 11 " Privateer's Man - - 19
Hints on Etiquette - - - 11
M'C'ulloch'!, Geographical Dictionary 18
Osborne's Oceanus - 32
Hudson'sExecntor's Guide - - !-•
Mitchell's Australian Expedition - 21
Passages from Modern History * 3*
" On Making Wills - - 12
Murray's Encyclop. of Geography - ti
Pycroft's Engli.li Heading - • It
Pages.
Pages.
'
London's Gardening - - - 17
Smith's (G.) Perilous Times - - " 2S II
Pages.
" Plants .... 17
" " Religion of Anc. Britain 2S I]
Bull's Hints to Mothers - - - 5
" Trees and Shiubs - - 17
" " Sacred Annals - - 27 D
" Management of Children - 5
M'Culloch'sGeographicalDictionary 18
• (Sydney) Sermons - - T. \
Copland's Dictionary of Medicine - 7
" Dictionary of Commerce 18
" " Moral Philosophy U7 |j
Elliotson's Human Physiology - 8 Latham On Diseases of the Heart - 15
Murray's Encyclop. of Geography- 22 U re's Dictionary of Art*, &c. - -. 31
" (J.) St. Paul - - Soames' Latin Church - - - 28 H
Moore On Health, Disease ^Remedy 21
Webster's Domestic Economy - 32
Solomon's Son9 illuminated - 23 1
Pereira On Food and Diet - - 24
Southev's Life of Wesley - - 29 I
Reece's Medical Guide - 25
Poetry and the Drama.
Stephen's Church of Scotland - 29 1
Thomson On Food - - 30
Tale's History of St. Paul - - 29 1
Miscellaneous.
Aikin's (Dr.) British Poets - - 3 Flowers and their kindred Thoughts 22
Tayler's Lady Mary - - - 29 1 " Margaret; or, the Pearl - 29 B
Fruits from Garden and Field - 22
" (Isa.ic) Loyola - - 30 I
Allen On Prerogative - 3 Blakey's Philosophy of Mind - 4
Goldsmith's Poems illustrated - 9 Gray's Elegy, illuminated - - 22
Thumb Bible (The) - - - 30 1 Tomline's Introduction to the Bible 30 I
Coad's Memorandum - - - 6
He v's Moral of Flowers - - - 11
Turner's Sacred History - - - 31 1
Colton's Lacon - - - - 6 De Morgan On Probabilities - 16
" Sylvan Musings - - - 11 Kent's Aletheia - - - - 14
Twelve Years Ago - - - 31 1 Walker's Elementa Liturgica - 31 f
De Stnelecki's New South Wales - 7 Dresden Gallery - 8 Dunlop's History of Fiction - 8 Graham's English - - - - 9 Grant's Letters from the Mountains 11