act of violence there is no vestige in the laws of antiquity, since those sage legislators conceived it an injustice to make one person pay for what was due by another. But it seems evident that such reprisals were common after the tenth or eleventh century of the christian æra, when the cities of Italy were become free, and formed separate republics, frequently at strife with each other. These disorders were augmented by the quarrels between the popes and emperors, and the Guelf and Ghibelline parties, which spread division through the whole country, and rendered it a scene of rapine and violence.

The system of reprisals appears in as equitable a form as it was capable of in the statutes of the Modenese, A. D. 1327. These enjoin that before reprisals should be granted to any individual who had been robbed in another city or district, or was refused payment of a debt, a diligent enquiry should be made into the truth of his case. If his claim should appear just and clear, the community was to write in his favour to the other community. If letters were of no avail, the community was to send a person in a public character to the city of the robber or debtor, to enquire further into the fact, and seek the remedy provided by the law of nations. In case no regard was paid to this mission, then permission was to be given for making reprisals. All that should be taken from a citizen or inhabitant of the community refusing justice was to be put up to auction, and satisfaction to be made out of it to the injured person. The care of these reprisals was committed to the merchants' consuls. If any city should decree reprisals against any Modenese it was the business of the Podesta (chief magistrate) of Modena to interpose in order to divert the stroke by way of agreement, and exempt his people, if possible, from all mischief. By a farther law it was enacted, for the public advantage of the merchants, that the Podesta of Modena, in the first month of his office, should enquire and refer to the general council concerning the terminating of all reprisals subsisting between the community and men of Modena, and those of Parma, Cremona, Reggio and other cities, in order that the men of Modena might go and come with their persons and goods securely in the said cities." Arbiters were at length appointed between neighbouring cities to decide all controversies relative to reprisals; and in fine, decrees were made condemning the communities themselves, and not individuals, in costs and damages, which was an important step to the abolition of the custom of reprisals. For when the communities were obliged to answer for the defaults or violences of their members against those of another community, it became their interest to see that justice was done to strangers according to the law of nations; and thus all pretexts for private retribution were abrogated. Permissions for reprisals therefore ceased to be granted, as societies became better ordered and more enlightened; and the practice finally went into total disuse in Italy, and also in Germany, whither it had penetrated.

A.

To

Sir,

To the Editor of the Athenæum.

OF the moral pieces of Horace, which I think by much the most valuable of his works, there is no one which I read with more entertainment than the third satire of the second book, in which, under the person of Damasippus, he undertakes to show that insanity may be predicated of the great mass of mankind, as well as of those who are formally reckoned insane. The vivacity and humour with which he supports this thesis are truly admirable; and what is more, there is a fund of good-sense and sound philosophy in the ground of his argument, which entitles it to serious attention. In fact, nothing is more difficult than to establish such a definition of insanity as shall not include a multitude of persons who walk about and perform the usual functions in society, whilst in some one point they appear entirely to have discarded the guidance of reason.

This Damasippus, it seems, was a great virtuoso; a nice judge of antient works of art, and an adept in calculating the value of fine houses and gardens. This turn led him to be a constant frequenter of auctions, and in the natural course of things, to throw away all his property. When he found himself ruined, in a fit of vexation for his folly, he hurried away to the Tiber with the intention of drowning himself; but by good fortune he fell in with a stoical acquaintance, who diverted him from his purpose by offering to prove that he had no occasion to think worse of himself than of the rest of mankind, who, examined by the test of philosophy, would all appear as insane as he. Damasippus then, in a dialogue with Horace, goes on to repeat the stoic's train of reasoning. He begins with enquiring what madness is, and defines it to be every species of mental blindness which proceeds from folly or ignorance of the truth of things. From this position it is not difficult for him to comprehend among the insane every man who lies under the dominion of a ruling passion, or who deviates in his conduct from the ordinary maxims of prudence and good sense. He then, in a very lively and dramatic style of narrative, proceeds to give examples of insanity in the instances of the avaritious, the ambitious, the superstitious, the spendthrift, the lover, and the like. When he has gone through his catalogue, Horace says to him, "Tell me, now, what kind of madness I labour under, for to myself I seen in my sober senses." "What! (replies Damasippus) do you think, that when the frantic Agave carried in her hand the head of her unhappy son, she thought herself mad?". He then gives him some proofs of his irrationality. In the first place, you build, that is, you ape the tall, when you are only two feet high. Do you think that it becomes you to do whatever Mecenas does? Then you write verses, which if ever any man did in his senses, perhaps you may. I say nothing of your fits of furious rage, of your ambition to make a figure beyond your fortune, of your promiscuous

amours"

amours

Here Horace can bear no more, and puts an end to the dialogue by crying for mercy.

It is evident that the poet in this piece has assumed a principle in its extreme, for the purpose of scattering the shafts of satire widely around him; but without admitting the stoical dogma in its full extent, it may serve as the ground of a sober discussion of the question, What is the essence of insanity?

To this question I find that some of the acutest enquirers have nothing more precise to answer, generally, than that it is a manner of thinking and acting different from that of the majority; so that the reply of the patient in Bedlam, who was asked what he was put there for, seems to have been perfectly correct: "I thought the world mad, and the world thought me mad, and I was out-voted." Since, however, there are few individuals who do not in some of their opinions and actions differ from the majority, whom yet no one thinks to be insane, there must be something extraordinary, either in the kind or degree of such difference, to justify the character of insanity. In some cases the error of the mind is so obvious and decided, that none but the patient himself can doubt of it; as when a person fancies himself to be a king or emperor, or imagines that the objects around him are totally different from what they appear to every other man's senses. Thus the citizen of Argos, mentioned by Horace, conceived himself, while sitting in an empty theatre, to be a spectator of admirable tragedies, and took great pleasure in the delusion. Yet he was one

Cætera qui vitæ servaret munia recto
More; bonus sane vicinus, amabilis hospes,
Comis in uxorem, posset qui ignoscere servis,
Et signo krso non insanire lagenæ;

Posset qui rupem et puteum vitare patentem:

which lines Pope has thus imitated;

In all but this, a man of sober life,
Fond of his friend, and civil to his wife;
Not quite a madman tho' a pasty fell,
And much too wise to walk into a well,

Clear, however, as this case of madness is, who will draw the line between it, and that hypochondriacism which makes a man fancy that his nose is too big to pass through a door, or his legs too slender to bear his weight? Physicians call such a mental affection a hallucination of the ideas; but it wants nothing except permanence to entitle it to the denomination of real lunacy.

Of conceptions of things widely different from those of the rest of mankind, who are more palpable examples than the tribe of wild theorists and extravagant projectors? These men entertain with full persuasion propositions that to common sense appear manifestly absurd; and are totally blind to objections and difficulties that to every one be sides appear insurmountable. The theorist will stake his reputation, and the projector his fortune, upon such conceptions, to the certain de

triment

triment of both. Ardent in the pursuit of some great end, they are incapable of any just calculation of means; and this disproportion of means to end is a constant concomitant of the speculations of a mind in which fancy predominates over reason. I was lately told of a remarkable instance of a project originating in the brain of a person labouring under temporary derangement. Being allowed the use of pen and paper, he drew up a scheme, enforced with considerable powers of eloquence, for extinguishing all wars and contentions among mankind. Assuming for his fundamental position, in consequence, I suppose, of reading the late discussions concerning population, that all these disorders arose from the want of land enough to spread upon, he proposed that a machine should be invented (which might easily be done) for stretching out the coasts, so as to occupy the surrounding space of sea, now useless to the purposes of human subsistence. "Thus," said he, "Ireland (of which he was a native) might be extended indefinitely westward; England, south-west-ward; and so forth." Projects, in a small degree less absurd, have frequently proceeded from persons not in a lunatic house. The late Dr. Darwin has given abundant proof of possessing not only a sound mind, but an uncommon degree of sagacity; but if he had been known only by his schemes of mending the climates of the frigid and torrid zones by towing ice-islands from the pole to the equator, and of regulating the winds by means of chemical mixtures, I fear, he would have been placed

fæcunda in gente Meneni.

If we enter the regions of fanaticism and enthusiasm, we find ourselves treading closely indeed upon the borders of madness, and the line that separates them is almost imperceptible. "Procul, procul este profani!" Far off all ye who wish to preserve the profaneness of reason, while inspiration holds her orgies with her frantic votaries! That a distempered imagination is the usual source of supposed supernatural gifts and impressions of every kind, will scarcely be doubted by any but those who partake of the same affection. It is no objection to this opinion, that such pretensions are often found in alliance with craft and knavery, for it is one of the attributes of madness to display great cunning in the execution of the most irrational plans. This species of half-insanity is distinguished by its singularly contagious quality, so that it often spreads from an individual to become the epidemic of a whole community. In this, indeed, consists its danger to the public; for were it only the malady of a few detached individuals, it might be suffered to take its natural course, till it were extinguished for want of fuel. The Adamites of Amsterdam might have been left to the chastisement of colds and rheumatisms, had not they offended against public decency. In any case, the discipline of a mad-house is much preferable to the old method of fire and faggot; and even that is more severe than is commonly requisite in an enlightened age and country. For my part, I never could discover why poor Brothers was shut up in a cell, while so many

3

other

other "dreamers of dreams" were suffered to go at large, unless there were grounds to apprehend the unpeopling of Duke's Place by an expedition to the Holy Land.

Nearly a kin to the exaltation of mind occasioned by enthusiasm, is the case of violent and uncontroulable passions, which frequently bring a man into a state scarcely distinguishable from madness. Á writer, indeed, has happily said of an habitually passionate man, that "he is a madman with lucid intervals." I have known instances of insanity, in which the only symptoms were excessive irritability of temper, joined with an extraordinary proneness to suspicion, while the powers of the intellect remained uncommonly vigorous and acute. How nearly have some very eminent men of admired talents approached to this condition? Without meaning any disrespect to the memory of Mr. Burke, I may instance his dagger-scene in the house of commons, and the perpetual exasperation under which he laboured near the close of life, while the savage scenes of the French Revolution were transacting, as proofs of a temporary privation of the power of self-government. It gives, indeed, a very depreciating idea of human reason, to be told, as they who frequent promiscuous company often are, that there are certain topics which must not be started in the presence of certain persons, lest they should break out into displays of unseemly violence. What is this caution but an avowal that we habitually live among persons who are not masters of themselves, and are fitter for a mad-house than for sober and rational society?

As the extreme of high and fiery spirits treads on the border of one species of insanity, so the gloom and despondency of low spirits is equally on the verge of another. Melancholy madness, indeed, will scarcely admit of any other characteristic than that of the mind dwelling so intensely upon some one distressful idea as to unfit the patient for the ordinary functions and enjoyments of life; and surely the same may be said of a high degree of what has been called spleen or low spirits. The identity of these affections ought, at least, to be maintained by coroner's juries, who generally admit instances of unusual depression] to be sufficient proofs of mental derangement to justify verdict of insanity in cases of suicide. The horrible idea of eternal reprobation, which haunts the imagination of so many converts to a a gloomy system of religion, seems indeed, in a susceptible mind, scarcely compatible with the preservation of reason; and it is no wonder that the strongest understandings sink under it.

Another aberration from the common judgment and practice of mankind consists of oddities and singularities in manners and habits of life. Of these some are so extravagant that they may justly be thought to denote a perversion of the rational faculty, whilst others are often found to subsist with an extraordinary degree of good sense. Indeed, the same enlargement of mind and freedom of prejudice which lead a person to think for himself in important matters, will frequently in duce him to act in trifles in a way which seems to himself more rea⚫ sonable than the customary mode, regardless of the hazard of being wondered at, or ridiculed. Aversion to restraint, and contempt of VOL. I.

E

common