WILLIAM ROBERT HICKS, OF BODMIN". 
G9 
or Cornucopia. Blessing and Curse is Alpha and Omega; or 
Castor and Pollux," &c. 
He usually begins by attacking some well-known authority, but 
as he writes he gets excited, and becomes more and more 
incoherent. The association of his ideas is curiously mixed, 
the sounds of the words, and their meaning or their place in 
literature, in Latin or English, or in mythology, being all confused 
together. He proved in one of his papers that light and darkness 
were the same things (a sort of paradox he was very fond of), 
because to pitch was to alight, and pitch was darkness — pitch-dark. 
Burke was a mathematician by profession ; that is to say, he 
taught mathematics in a country school. He had not gone mad 
on a subject of which he knew something, but he had, naturally 
enough perhaps, gone mad on a subject of which he knew 
nothing. 
Hicks used to say that the men in the asylum were more 
interesting than the women, because men went mad on all sorts of 
subjects, whereas women went mad nearly always either on love 
or religion. 
When Hicks first took charge of the asylum he gave a supper 
to those of the inmates whom he considered safe. He took 
the head of the table, and asked one of them, who was a preacher, 
to say grace. The man began, but could not finish, and went 
on saying grace until the rest of the company became very wild 
with impatience, and a sailor called out, " Avast there!" The 
man having at last sat down, Hicks saw one of the patients with 
his eyes in a fine frenzy rolling. He therefore asked him what he 
would take, by way of quieting him. The man replied, " A slice 
of Bunker's Hill." To which Hicks answered, " Help yourself." 
The beef and plum pudding made all quiet in the end. 
One of the methods for quieting a refractory patient, I believe 
still in vogue, is a douche bath applied to the head ; and as Hicks 
thought it a very severe remedy, he tried it on himself, that 
he might know what it really was. He told me it was very 
severe. 
Hicks had a very large collection of stories picked up anywhere; 
amongst others, some from the Court of Assize held at Bodmin, 
where he used to entertain the Bar mess. 
