able coincidence that every predisposing and exciting cause by which the author could denote an intention of making his hero subject to paroxysms of insanity, has been clearly developed in the course of the five acts. The stages of the disease are distinctly marked from the first scene of Hamlet's appearance, when he expresses a disrelish of life, until the violent explosion of his madness at the grave of Ophelia."*

Hamlet's mind appears, from what we can collect of his previous history, to have been one of great power and depth. Well versed in the literature and philosophy of his day, naturally disposed to retirement, he possessed all the character of Milton's Il Penseroso. The arched walk of twilight groves and shadows brown-the studious cloister pale-were the places in which he delighted, and not the pageantry of royalty or the vain delight of giddy pleasure. This natural bias has been recognised on all hands as the precursor of melancholy madness. Hippocrates tells us that the chief reasons which led the citizens of Abdera to suspect Democritus of insanity was, that he forsook the city, and lived in groves and hollow trees, upon a green bank by a brook side, or by a confluence of waters, day and night.

The first scene in which Hamlet is introduced, shews us the state of his mind and the tedium vitæ under which he laboured; though the tendency to suicide, which it would not have been in an advanced stage of his disease, is controlled by religious fear:

"Oh! that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely."

The truth of this description of the mental state of approaching melancholia, admits of corroboration from numerous and well-authenticated facts. Erasmus Darwin tells us of a gentleman who said to him "a ride out in the morning, and a warm parlour and pack of cards in the afternoon, are all that life affords." In a few months afterwards he destroyed himself.†

Illustrations of Mania, Melancholia, Craziness, and Demonomania, as displayed in the characters of Lear, Ophelia, and Edgar, by George Farren. + Darwin's Zoonomia.

The insufficiency of natural beauties, of the harmony of the universe, of the ordinary pursuits of life to produce mental ease, are next exemplified in the address of Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and it is a curious fact that most writers on this disease have taken Shakspeare's description of it, finding it so true to nature, and aware that no composition of their own could possibly convey the same ideas so well. "I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise, and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire-why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and motion, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me!"

The very pursuits of minds thus disposed all tend toward the same subject; their studies, their favourite authors, have all a misanthropic tinge. Thus we find Hamlet introduced reading that passage in the tenth satire of Juvenal, beginning

"Da spatium vitæ, multos da Jupiter annos,"

in which old age is dispraised, and the natural defects attendant upon advanced life set forth in most dishonest satire. Hamlet's madness, like that of melancholy generally, is not one continued stream of mental aberration, not one long uninterrupted chain of monotonous woe, but a moody, wayward affection, pregnant with the most poignant wit, shadowed with the deepest gloom, or occasionally, but rarely, breaking forth into paroxysms bordering upon the violence of mania. His accumulated misfortunes-the murder of his father-the marriage of his mother-the derangement of Ophelia and the loss of his kingdom-render that alienation of mind at length real which was only, in the first instance, assumed as a mask. We cannot fail to be struck with the peculiar pertinence and tartness of some of the replies of Hamlet, especially in his conversations with Rosencrantz and Polonius; and this may be supposed to be discordant with the state of mental disease under which he labours.

It may appear strange to those who have not studied the subject, that persons possessed of a defective judgment should at any time be

VOL. V.-NO. XVII.

I.

1

of quick and lively apprehension, and thus be witty without being wise. But the faculty of wit is not dependent so much upon the judgment as upon the imagination. "And hence," says Mr. Locke, some reason may be perhaps given for that common observation that men who have a great deal of wit have not always the clearest judgment or the deepest reason. For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy. Judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from the other ideas, wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. And hence we may easily account for that gaiety, and those ebullitions of a vivid fancy, which so often assume the character of wit in persons whose minds are deranged." How wonderfully has this property of the Imagination of the insane been analyzed by Shakspeare:

"How pregnant sometimes his replies are!

A happiness that often madness hits on,
Which sanity and reason could not be
So prosperously delivered of."

How powerful a faculty of the human mind is the Imagination! and how necessary is it for persons in whom it is apt to reign paramount to the judgment, to acquire, by all artificial means, some control over it, which nature has not given them.

In the cases which we have been considering, those of Hamlet and the French watch-maker, an encouragement of its undue prevalence was the principal cause of their insanity; and though, with the exception of some rare instances, the Imagination itself might not actually become so tyrannical as to render the individual insane without the application of some powerful moral affection, still this unequal balance between it and the judgment render the mind less capable of resisting any shock which, in the varied tenor of human occurrences, it is so likely to receive. When thus indulged, the mind does not view the objects around it in their proper light and natural relation; it takes part of their properties only, and forms them into combinations which are incongruous and unnatural. Acting upon data thus constituted, the conclusions which it draws cannot possibly be sound, since the premises upon which it acts are either decked in borrowed beauty or distorted by ideal deformity. The mind thus becomes like a bad mirror, which throws shades upon beauty,

and, by its unequal reflection of the different parts of an object, give to it a false and unreal aspect. The various kinds of insanity springing from superstition and fanaticism are all the result of this diseased condition of the Imagination. A most curious instance illustrative of this is recorded, in the German Psycological Magazine, of a gendarme, of Berlin, who, being disquieted in his mind, sought alleviation in the perusal of religious books. In reading The Bible, he was struck with the book of Daniel, and so much pleased with it that it became his favourite study; and from this time the idea of miracles so strangely possessed his imagination, that he began to believe he could perform them himself. "He was persuaded, more especially, that if he were to plant an apple tree with a view of its becoming a cherry tree, such was his power, that it would bear cherries. He was discharged from the king's service, and sent to the workhouse, where he conducted himself calmly, orderly, and industriously for two years, never doing any thing that betrayed insanity. He answered every question correctly, except when the subject concerned miracles, in regard to which he maintained his old notions; adding, however, at the same time, that if he found on trial, after he was at home, that the event did not correspond with his expectation, he would readily relinquish the thought, and believe he had been mistaken. He confessed that he had already removed one error from his mind in this way, for there was an old woman whom he had, at one time, considered to be a witch, but whom he afterwards discovered to be no such thing."

• The same species of morbid Imagination constituting the insane state, sometimes extends from one individual to many, to the whole inhabitants of the same family, community, town, or nation; as the history of some particular epidemics of this kind well illustrates. Of such character was the dancing mania of the 16th century, (a complete notice of which has lately been given us by Dr. Babington, from the German of Hecker), in which both the disease and its cure, which was effected by music, were solely to be traced to the workings of a diseased fancy. Affections of this kind have been attributed, by Foville and others, to the simultaneous action of moral impressions of the same character upon a number of individuals at once. We cannot, however, conceive of moral impressions of a similar character producing the same effects upon the inhabitants of a whole nation, or spreading even further than this; for the dancing mania extended over the whole of central Europe. I am led rather to attribute it to the faculty of imitation, or instinct of imitation, as it has been termed; the mental impression having primitively been made upon the few, or upon one, and afterwards spreading from the exercise of this peculiar faculty to many. The Imagination is commonly led captive through the credulity

I come now to speak, shortly, of those forms of mental disturb ance in which the Imagination is called forth in its most energetic forms; where, the judgment exercising no part of the mental faculty, the mind is given up to the vacillating and uncertain government of the former.

I need not repeat what has been recognised by the only two judicious writers on insanity with whom I am acquainted, Pinel and Esquirol, that the peculiar form of alienation is regulated altogether by the previous constitution of the mind, and that this scarcely ever takes place without a powerful predisposition. This predisposition to mania is different from that which formed the precursory stage of craziness and melancholy. The individual is generally characterized-not by a powerful judgment, a brilliant and lively wit, or profound thought-but, by great energy of purpose, sudden and quick in his determinations, violent in his affections, and implacable in his hatred, embracing the most exaggerated schemes with an enthusiasm which in itself is hardly indicative of perfect sanity. His imagination is ardent, the visions which it produces full of life and fire. His is the royal road to fame; the whole energy of his intellect is bent on the accomplishment of his designs. Obstacles disappear, as it were by magic, from before him; he is impetuous, ungovernable, and impatient of controul. The fancies of his dreams are similar to the determinations of his waking hours: he dreams not of the calm sea, of the peaceful home, but of the tempest, the hurricane, and the tornado-not of the arts of peace, but of the din of war. So active is the imagination of these persons, that somnambulism is a frequent occurrence with them: the hurry of their mind will not allow them time for needful repose. The imagination of the maniac is a perfect chaos, having no direction, no harmony, no or from the narration of others, and not from actual impression first made upon the mind so influenced. Many curious examples in illustration and support of this remark, are to be found in Walker's Lives, in Sir W. Scott's Letters on Demonology, and elsewhere. The instinct or faculty of imitation is widely extended in nature, possessed by all animals and man, and in greater power by the latter as he is less civilized or less intellectual, approaching more to the state of the brute or the savage. Hence we find diseases in which the faculty of imitation is concerned, almost peculiar to the ages of ignorance and superstition. Hence all the epidemic diseases springing from a distempered fancy occurred in the ages and countries where fanaticism prevailed, when the laws regulating the phenomena of natural occurrences both in physics and physiology were utterly unknown, and where the promulgator or advocate of truth was branded as an atheist for his unbelief in the errors which surrounded him, and happy if his talents or his zeal did not hurry him to the cells of the Inquisition, to the scaffold, or the rack.