Notices respecting New Books. 455 
should often, in a person of more than ordinary irritability, pro- 
duce, or at any rate accelerate the last and incurable form of 
that disease, to which at first perhaps there was only a delusive 
semblance or merely an incipient approximation ? 
<¢ Tasso, the celebrated poet, was once instigated by the vio- 
lence of an amorous impulse to embrace a beautiful woman in 
the presence of her brother, who happening to be a man of rank 
and power, punished this poetic license by locking up the offen- 
der in a receptacle for lunatics. It is said ‘that by this confine- 
ment he was made mad, who was before only too impetuous or 
indiscreet. 
“ That a wretched being, who has been for some time con- 
. fined in a receptacle for lunatics, is actually insane, can no more 
prove that he was so when he first entered it, than a person’s 
being affected with fever in the black hole of Caleutta, is an 
evidence of his having previously laboured under febrile infection. 
“© Bakewell, the late celebrated agriculturist, was accustomed 
to conquer the insubordination or any vicious irregularity of his 
horses, not by the ordinary routine of whipping and spurring, but 
by the milder and more effectual method of kindness and caresses ; 
and it is worthy of being remembered and practically applied, 
that, although the human has higher faculties than other ani- 
mals, they have still many sympathies in common; there are 
certain laws and feelings which regulate and govern alike every 
class and order of animated existence. 
<¢ In order to obtain a salutary influence over the wanderings 
of a maniac, we must first secure his confidence. This cannot 
be done, without behaving towards him with a delicacy due to 
his unfortunate state, which for the most part ought to be re- 
garded not as an abolition, but as a suspension merely of the 
rational faculties. Lord Chesterfield speaks, in one of his hu- 
morous essays, of a lady whose reputation was not lost, but was. 
only mislaid, In like manner, instead of saying of a man that 
he has lost his senses, we shonld in many instances more correctly 
perhaps say that they were mislaid. Derangement is not to be 
confounded with destruction ; we must not mistake a cloud for 
night, or fancy, because the sun of reason is obscured, that it 
. will never again enliven or illuminate with its beams. There is 
ground to apprehend that fugitive folly.is too often converted 
juto a fixed and settled phrensy; a transient guest into an irre- 
movable tenant of the mind; an oceasional and accidental aber- 
ration of intellect, into a confirmed and inveterate habit of de- 
reliction; by a premature and too precipitate adoption of mea- 
sures and methods of management, which sometimes, indeed, 
are necessary, but which are so ouly in cases of extreme and ul- 
timate desperation, 
Ff4 ** A heavy 
