454 Notices respecting New Books. 
and expanded views, but as a pleasing example how forcibly such 
a heart-rending subject can be made to press on the human mind, 
and even how attractive it can be rendered, by those charms of 
eloquence, accompanied by a poetical yet chaste imagination, 
for which all Dr, Reid’s writings are distinguished. 
LUNATIC ASYLUMS. 
* Tam not mad! TI have been imprisoned for mad—scourged for mad— 
banished for mad—but mad | am not.” 
Guy Mannering- 
“The mind of a man may be bruised or broken as well as any 
limb of his body, and the injury, when it occurs, is not so easy 
of reparation. A morbidly tumid fancy cannot, like many other 
swellings, be made speedily to subside; an intellect out of joint 
will not allow of being set with the same facility as a dislocated 
bone; nor can the deep and often hidden ulcerations which arise 
from mental distemper or disorganization, be healed with the 
same readiness or certainty as those more palpable sores which 
take place on the surface of the body. On this account it is, 
that so close and vigilant an observation is required in watching 
the incessantly varying movements, and in inspecting the too 
exquisitely delicate texture of a disordered and highly wrought 
imagination. 
“ One thing at least is certain, that in the management of 
such maladies, tenderness is better than torture, kindress more 
effectual than constraint. Blows, and the strait-waistceat, 
are often, it is to be feared, too hastily employed. It takes less 
trouble to fetter by means of cords, than by the assiduities of 
sympathy or affection. Nothing has a more favourable and 
controuling influence over one who is disposed to or actually af- 
fected with melancholy or mania, than an exhibition of -friend- 
ship or philanthropy; excepting indeed in such cases, and in 
that state of the disease, in which the mind has been hardened 
and almost brutalized, by having already been the subject of 
coarse and humiliating treatment. Where a constitutional in- 
clination towards insanity exists, there is in general to be ob- 
served a more than ordinary susceptibility to resentment at any 
act that offers itself in the shape of an injury or an insult. | 
‘¢ Hence it will not appear surprising, that as soon as an unfor- 
tunate victim has been inclosed within the awful barriers of either 
the public or the minor and more clandestine Bethlems, the destiny 
of his reason should, in a large proportion of cases, be irretrie- 
vably fixed. The idea that he is supposed to be insane, is al- 
most of itself sufficient to make him so; and when such a mode 
of management is used with men, as ought not to be, although 
it too generally is, applied even to brutes, can we pica if . 
shoul 
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