271 



HORACE ON INSANITY 



By D. W. Nash, Surgeon. 



'* There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 

 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 



» True, O princely Dane ! And there is more philosophy in 

 Horace than the world in general dreams of, and which, if matters 

 progress after their present fashion, will, in all probability, ere long 

 " be dipped in Lethe and^ forgotten :" for in these utilitarian days, 

 when cui bono ? is the universal question, and the dulce is too often 

 divorced from its long and pleasing union with the utile ; when, to 

 use the favourite phraseology of the Goethe school, the substantial 

 has usurped the throne of the ideal ; when the argent comptant of 

 practical information is more readily received than the promissory 

 notes of the imagination — there is apparently a growing deprecia- 

 tion of the politer branches of education, and a not unnatural, 

 though perhaps, comparatively, an over-estimate of the value of 

 those acquirements which are more directly available in the world 

 we live in. 



It has often been stated, of late, in works professedly on educa- 

 tion, that the time employed by young persons in the acquisition of 

 the Greek and Latin languages is, in fact, so much time thrown 

 away ; for that a knowledge of these languages is not productive of 

 sufficient advantage to them in after life to compensate for the la- 

 bour and time bestowed on their acquisition, which time and labour 

 could of course have been available for the purpose of acquiring 

 more useful knowledge. 



In a former number of the Analyst, a quotation from Dr. Shir- 

 ley Palmer's Popular Illustrations of Medicine was adduced to 

 strengthen the arguments of a writer against the utility of a classi- 

 cal education. " It may even be questioned,'* says Dr. Shirley Pal- 

 mer, in the work before mentioned, " whether the literary acquire- 

 ments of early age are worth the sacrifice and the risk incurred in 

 their pursuit. Many a weakly stripling has spent the brightest 

 and most joyous years of a precarious existence in irksome drudgery 

 upon the works of Homer and of Virgil, long ere his mind could 

 comprehend the majesty of the Greek, or be smitten with the splen- 



