gether, and so make wrong propositions; while idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all."

"Mental aberration," says Dr. Conolly, "is the impairment of one or more of the faculties of the mind, accompanied with, or inducing, a defect in the comparative faculty."

Dr. Battie's notion is more to the purpose. "Insanity," he says, "consists in the rising up in the mind of images not distinguishable by the patient from impressions on the senses-" Or in the few and expressive words of Hibbert, of" Ideas rendered as vivid as actual impressions."

Cullen's idea of mania is, that its leading character is a false judgment of the relations of things, producing disproportionate emotions.

Dr. Pritchard's opinion is applicable to a wider range of mental derangements. The confounding the results of memory and imagination, and mistaking the reveries of the latter for the reflections of the former; these he considers the distinguishing feature of madness.

Dr. Hawkesworth calls lunacy a condition of the mind in which ideas are conceived, that material objects do not excite; and those which are excited, do not produce corresponding impressions on the senses.

In ancient times, insanity was looked upon as a sort of transmigration of the feelings and phantasies of evil spirits into the bodies of human beings; as in the case of those demoniacs in the scripture, who wandered about naked, and roamed amongst sepulchres, making hideous noises.

The Greeks held the same opinion of its origin. Zenophon uses the word demon for frenzy; and Aristophanes calls madness kakodaimonian.

But the two definitions of this malady, which may be found to apply to the case of Cowper, are those of Locke and Mead. The former, after noticing the characteristics of general insanity, says: "A man who is very sober, and of a right way of thinking in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any man in Bedlam, if either by any sudden or very strong impression, or long fixing the fancy upon one sort of thoughts, incoherent ideas become cemented together so powerfully as to remain united." Dr. Mead regards madness as a particular malady of the imagination, which arises from intense and incessant application of the mind to any one object.

Such are the authorities we have thought it necessary to adduce; because a general notion of the character of mania is requisite to enable us to come to a just conclusion on the subject before us, and because it is the collective information of all we have quoted, rather than the particular opinions of any one of them, that is likely to lead us to a correct knowledge of the nature of Cowper's affliction.

But there is one thing to be considered in every inquiry into the insanity of an indivídual, which limits that inquiry to a very short and simple investigation of two obvious matters;—namely, what degree of eccentricity constitutes madness, and what amount of madness incapacitates the sufferer for the performance of the duties of his station, or for the management of his affairs?

CHAPTER XXIII.

COWPER CONTINUED.

We now proceed to the sad history of Cowper's mental affliction, with those sentiments of pain and even reluctance which all must feel who approach this subject, but disclaiming those feelings of false delicacy and morbid sensibility which are commonly paraded before similar inquiries.

Cowper was the son of a clergyman, of a family of some distinction; his early education appears to have been strictly religious, but it does not appear that his peculiar gentleness of disposition was duly observed and considerately treated by his father. In his sixth year he was deprived of an excellent mother, and left to the guidance of persons ill qualified for the difficult task of bringing up a youth of great delicacy of constitution, and extraordinary sensibility. Nevertheless, at the tender age of six years, this timid boy was taken from home, and placed at a public school, where he became the victim, real or imaginary, of juvenile persecution. He speaks in his letters of the tyranny of one boy in particular, as having been the terror of his existence; so much so, that he never had the courage to look him in the face all the time he was at school, such an impression did the savage treatment of this boy make upon him.

"The whole of his early life," says Stebbing, “ap

pears to have been misdirected, by a most culpably erroneous judgment in those who had the superintendance of his education. Cowper, from his earliest youth, was a prey to ill-health, and gave signs, it is said, in infancy, of that nervous sensibility which, as his years increased, gradually assumed the character of morbid melancholy."

After remaining two years at this school, he was removed from it in consequence of an inflammation in his eyes, which he remained subject to the whole of his life at intervals. This, combined with other circumstances in his medical history-the fairness of his complexion, and lightness of his hair-render it probable that there was either a scorbutic or scrofulous taint in his constitution, which his pecullar delicacy of habit might not have allowed to develope itself externally, but which, neglected or overlooked, might have made inroads or internal textures, even on those of the brain itself. Hayley corroborates this opinion when speaking of the suddenness of the attacks of his malady. "It tends," he says, " to confirm an opinion that his mental disorder rose from a scorbutic habit, which, when his perspiration was obstructed, occasioned an unsearchable obstruction in the finer parts of his frame."

Cowper was now sent to Westminster, where he remained ttll his sixteenth year; all that time his timid and inoffensive spirit totally unfitting him for the hardships of a public school. On leaving Westminster he was articled to a solicitor. It would have been impossible to have chosen for him a more unsuitable profession than that of the law. At the expiration of his term he made his entry in the Temple, to qualify himself for the lucrative place of clerk to the house of lords

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-which post the interest of his friends had procured for him. During his early residence in the Temple, he associated with Churchill, Colman, and other persons of literary habits, and appears to have been gay and sociable in his intercourse with them. But this mode of life, his friend, Mr. Newton, told both him and the public at a later period, in a preface to the first edition of his poems, written at the request of Cowper, was living without God in the world," albeit his conduct at this time appears to have been neither profligate nor depraved. It was in the Temple, however, he was seized with the first attack of his disorder; "with such a dejection of spirits," he himself says, as none but those who have felt the same can have the least conception of. Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror, and rising up in despair. I presently lost all relish for those studies to which I had before been closely attached. The classics had no longer any charm for me; I had need of something more salutary than amusement, but I had no one to direct me where to find it." A change of scene was now recommended to him; he accordingly proceeded to Southampton, where he spent several months; and here it was that the first shadow of insanity obscured his mind, and that the fervour of his enthusiasm on a single subject assumed the settled character of monomania. This is not the place to inquire into the nature of the malady; it is enough to know that monomania is a partial abberation of intellect, a delusion on a particular point, which has been dwelt on with such intensity that the mind magnifies its importance, till its ultimate aspect becomes distorted. The malady may continue for life without abatement, or it may disappear and return at various