DISEASE OF THE BODY A MENTAL STIMULANT. 77 



the work was remembered when he recovered. " The book," says James 

 Ballantyne, " was not only written, but published, before Mr. Scott was 

 able to rise from his bed ; and he assured me that, when it was first put 

 into his hands in a complete shape, he did not recollect one single inci- 

 dent, character, or conversation it contained ! He did not desire me 

 to understand, nor did I understand, that his illness had erased from his 

 memory the original incidents of the story, with which he had been 

 acquainted from his boyhood. These remained rooted where they had 

 ever been ; or, to speak more explicitly, he remembered the general 

 facts of the existence of the father and mother, of the son and daugh- 

 ter, of the rival lovers, of the compulsory marriage, and the attack 

 made by the bride upon the hapless bridegroom, with the general catas- 

 trophe of the whole. All these things he recollected, just as he did be- 

 fore he took to his bed ; but he literally recollected nothing else not a 

 single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many scenes 

 and points of humor, not anything with which he was himself connected, 

 as the writer of the work." 



Later, when Scott was breaking down under severe and long-con- 

 tinued labor, and first felt the approach of the illness which ultimately 

 ended in death, he experienced strange mental phenomena. In his diary 

 for February 17, 1829, he notes that on the preceding day, at dinner, 

 though in company witht wo or three old friends, he was haunted by 

 " a sense of preexistence," a confused idea that nothing that passed 

 was said for the first time ; that the same topics had been discussed, 

 and that the same persons had expressed the same opinions before. 

 " There was a vile sense of a want of reality in all that I did or said." 



Dr. Reynolds related to Dr. Carpenter a case in which a Dissenting 

 minister, who was in apparently sound health, was rendered apprehen- 

 sive of brain-disease though, as it seemed, without occasion by a 

 lapse of memory similar to that experienced by Sir Walter Scott. He 

 " went through an entire pulpit service on a certain Sunday morning 

 with the most perfect consistency his choice of hymns and lessons and 

 his extempore prayer being all related to the subject of his sermon. On 

 the following Sunday morning he went through the introductory part 

 of the service in precisely the same manner giving out the same hymns, 

 reading the same lessons, and directing the extempore prayer in the 

 same channel. He then gave out the same text and preached the very 

 same sermon as he had done on the previous Sunday. When he came 

 down from the pulpit it was found that he had not the smallest remem- 

 brance of having gone through precisely the same service on the pre- 

 vious Sunday ; and, when he was assured of it, he felt considerable un- 

 easiness lest his lapse of memory should indicate some impending at- 

 tack of illness. None such, however, supervened ; and no rationale can 

 be given of this curious occurrence, the subject of it not being liable to 

 fits of " absence of mind," and not having had his thoughts engrossed 

 at the time by any other special preoccupation." Itis possible that the 



