GEN. II. SPEC. III. Empathema inane. Harebrained wounds, law-suits, and pecuniary compensations were the general consequence. At last an act of notoriety put an end to his career of violence. Enraged at a woman who had used offensive language to him, he tumbled her into a well. A public prosecution followed, and, on the tes- passion. timony of a great many witnesses who deposed as to his furious deportment, he was condemned to perpetual confinement at the lunatic asylum of Bicêtre. illustrated. On the commencement of the French revolution, when Further the mob broke open the doors of the prisons and the lunatic hospitals, to liberate all whom they thought unjustly confined and under restraint, a patient labouring under the present species in the Bicêtre asylum, pleaded his own cause so rationally, and pathetically, and so artfully accused the governor of the asylum of cruelty, that the armed rabble commanded him to be instantly liberated, and scarcely suffered the governor to escape with impunity. The patient thus restored to freedom was led about in triumph amidst the reiterated shouts of Vive la République! The sight of so many armed men, their loud and confused noise and tumultuous conduct, soon roused the visionary hero to a fresh paroxysm of fury. He seized, with a vigorous grasp, the sabre of his next neighbour, brandished it about with great violence, and wounded his liberators indiscriminately. Fortunately he was soon mastered; when the savage mob thought proper to lead him back to his cell, and with shame and reluctance acknowledged their own ignorance and misconduct. The mode of treatment may be collected from the Remedial preceding pages. process. GEN. III. Origin of generic name. GENUS III. ALUSIA. Illusion. Hallucination. THE JUDGEMENT PERVERTED OR OVERPOWERED BY THE v, ບ ALUSIA is here derived from the Greek anuσis, “aberratio", from anúw, "errabundâ mente afficior",-" inquietus aberro:" whence the Latin term allucinatio or hallucinatio. According to the rule which renders the Greek , by the Latin y, the name of this genus ought rather perhaps to be alysis; but as the Latins have themselves retained the v in allucinatio, it is here suffered to continue in alusia, making a similar exception to that already observed in lues. The Greek term is preferred to the Latin, as the name of the genus, for the sake of Synonyms. uniformity. Sauvages, and after him Sagar, have employed hallucinatio as the name of an order; Darwin and Crichton as that of a genus, and, consequently, running parallel with the genus before us. Wherever the genus exists, hypochondrias or hypochondriasis is usually placed under it. It is so by Sauvages, Sagar, and Crichton; and it occupies the same place in Linnéus, who has merely adopted the term imaginarii instead of hallucinationes. Alusia embraces the two following species: 1. ALUSIA ELATIO. SENTIMENTALISM. MENTAL EXTRAVAGANCE. HYPOCHONDRISM. LOW SPIRITS. SPECIES I. ALUSIA ELATIO. Sentimentalism. Mental Extravagance. ROMANTIC IDEAS OF REAL LIFE; ARDENT AND EXALTED GEN. III. SPEC. I. THE merit or demerit of this species, named from the rhetoricians ELATIO, and with them importing" elevated, Species new exalted, magnificent style or imagery", must, I fear, to nosology mainly rest with the author himself. It is, however, and patho logy. Relation of strictly derived from nature, and is intended to fill up what has hitherto been left as a vacant niche by the nosologists. Alusia, or hallucination, like ecphronia or Analogy to insanity, comprises a list of affections that are character- ecphronia. ized by two opposite states of nervous action, entonic and atonic, or in the language of Dr. Cullen excitement and collapse; elatio is intended to include the former of these, as hypochondrias, the ensuing species, is, the latter. They stand in the same relation to each other as elevated and dejected madness or melancholy. Both are united with a peculiar modification of the digestive function, but possessing opposite bearings; being in the former strikingly active and energetic, and in the latter strikingly sluggish and languid. Hence under the first species the patient is able to endure enormous fastings, and to support life upon the scantiest and least nutritive diet, either of which would be destructive under the second. the present species to the ensuing. a A. Elatio heroica. Chivalry. Romantic gallantry. Description. Senti mental novelists sometimes make an approach to it. Illustrated. Chivalry. Romantic gallantry. False Inspiration. The age of the first of these varieties, that of CHIVALRY or ROMANTIC GALLANTRY, has nearly, if not altogether, departed. It may be regarded as a generous and highspirited flight of the imagination that gives a visionary colouring to the external world, and combines, without a due degree of discrimination, ideas of fact with those of fancy. Like many of the varieties of empathema or ungovernable passion, it may lead to or be combined with ecphronia or insanity. I have sometimes had to attend patients who, having spent the greater part of their days and nights over the most captivating novels of the present day, had acquired so much of this falsity of perception as to startle their friends around them, and to give evident proofs that they were of a mind occasionally deranged, though, when the attention could once be seriously engaged, capable of being brought down to the soberness of external objects and real life. These have commonly been ladies unmarried, or without a family, about the middle or a little beyond the middle of life, of a nervous temperament, fine taste and fancy, but whose education had been directed to subjects of superficial or external ornament rather than of intrinsic excellence. Their manner has been peculiarly courteous, their conversation sprightly and figurative, and their hand ready to aid the distrest. But it has been obvious that in all they were saying or doing they had some ideal character in their minds, whose supposed air, and language, and manners, they were copying; and the distrest were always most sure of relief and of a relief often beyond the necessity of the case, whose story was combined with some perilous adventure, or sentimental catastrophe. In former times, however, when the wild and daring GEN. III. spirit of romance formed the subject of popular study, and The spinsters, and the knitters in the sun, And the free maids that wove their threads with bones, SPEC. I. a A. Elatio heroica. Chivalry. Romantic gallantry. But far more com mon and former Gothic or in his pic Quixote true to the feeling of the times : this bewildering triumph of the imagination over the characterjudgement was far more common, and carried to a much istic in higher pitch. The high-toned and marvellous stories of times. La Morte d'Arthur, Guy of Warwick, Amadis of Gaul, During the The Seven Champions of Christendome, and The Mirror reign of of Knighthood; the splendid and agitating alternations Norman of magicians, enchanted castles, dragons, and giants, re- romance. doubtable combatants, imprisoned damsels, melting minstrelsy, tilts and tournaments, and all the magnificent imagery of the same kind, that so peculiarly distinguished the reign of Elizabeth, became a very frequent source of permanent hallucination. The historian of Don Quixote Cervantes adhered strictly to the tenour of his times in representing ture of Don the library of this most renowned knight as filled with romances of this description, and himself as being permanently crazed by an uninterrupted perusal of them. And that the same morbid effect was not confined to Spain, and was, indeed, common to our own country we know from the severe, but just invectives of Ascham against this class of writings, and his complaints of the disordered turn they had given to the public mind: and still more from the necessity Shakspeare felt himself under in making all his maniacal characters, whether really or but pretendedly so, deeply versed in the prose or poetical romances of the day, and throwing forth fragments of exquisite force or beauty in the midst of their wildest and most discordant ravings; Lear, Edgar, and the heart-broken Ophelia are in this respect alike gifted, and show to what sources their reading had been directed. Without an attention to these casual glances it is impossible to understand the meaning of the sentiment, and its force or feeling is lost upon us, as in the following burst and hence tive of Ascham. Proved fur the invec ther from the reading justly allot ed to many of Shakspeare's cha racters. |