BODILY ILLNESS AS A MENTAL STIMULANT. 245 



remained rooted where they had ever been ; or, to speak 

 more explicitly, he remembered the general facts of the exist- 

 ence of the father and mother, of the son and daughter, of 

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

 made by the bride upon the hapless bridegroom, with the 

 general catastrophe of the whole. All these things he recol- 

 lected, just as he did before he took to his bed ; but he 

 littrally recollected nothing else not a single character woven 

 by the romancer, not one of the many scenes and points of 

 humour, not anything with which he was himself connected, 

 as the writer of the work. 



Later, when Scott was breaking down under severe and 

 long-continued labour, 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 with two or three old friends, he was haunted by 

 ' a sense of pre-existence,' 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 apprehensive 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 



