world. He sang very well indeed; danced about the carriage on the lightest and most fantastic of toes; and continually made remarks which forcibly reminded one of Polonius's criticism upon Hamlet's conversation"How pregnant sometimes his replies are! a happiness that often madness hits on which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of." For example, he laughed uproariously at the notion of Mr. Gladstone, tired of politics, taking to polemics by way of recreation in his old age, and observed that that highly-gifted personage would be much better employed in his favorite pastime of cutting down trees than in setting Christians of various denominations by the ears. He told me that he meant to write to the People's William on the subject, and that he would turn that splendidly-gifted individual into a grass-hopper if he did not mend his ways. Altogether, my strange fellow-traveller reminded me not unfrequently of that witty Bedlamite who, being asked by Tom Brown, of The London Spy, why he had not married the woman for whom he had gone mad, replied, with a waggish wink, "Ah! no; I am mad enough in all conscience, but not quite so mad as that comes to." There is a good story, too, about a merry little maniac who was asked was he had come to be imprisoned. "it happened thus: I am the only sane man in the world. Everybody else is mad; but as they make the majority, and I am in a glorious minority of one, they have taken a mean advantage of me and locked me up ; but I am happier than all the rest put together. I despise them." How pleasant-how passing pleasant-it must be to eat of the "insane root," which, as Banquo assures us, "takes the reason prisoner," and to find that to explain how it "Well," said he, it transports one into an imaginary world, unvexed by the worries of our work-a-day existence. If you would see true happiness visit a lunatic asylum. There will you find monarchs who have the splendors of royalty without its cares; heroes who have the pomp and circumstance of glorious war without its perils; dunces who are wits, scholars and orators without the fatigue of mental culture; and paupers who, without a shilling in the world, deem themselves, and so deeming, are, to all intents and purposes, richer than the Rothschilds and the Barings. "They jest their words are loose As heaps of sand, and scattered wide from sense, Never shall I forget the millionaire with whom I had financial negotiations in a county asylum one day that I visited that noble institution some few years ago. He was a droll little fellow, as round as a water-butt, with very curly hair and piercing grey eyes as sharp as gimlets. Coming up to me with the blandest imaginable smile, he shook me by the hand with as much cordiality as though he had known me from my birth. He asked me my name and profession. I told him both. You should have seen the look of mingled pity and contempt with which he surveyed me from head to heels. "A literary man, indeed! Then you must be as poor as Lazarus. I dare say you haven't three halfpence in the world." I replied that I believed I could manage to muster that number of coins, but that he was right enough in supposing that I was not a rich I should think not, indeed. Why, you look as But I dare say you man. if you 66 hadn't half enough to eat. have a wife and nineteen children?" I answered emphatically in the negative. "Ah! well," he rejoined, "it is all the better for the wife and the children that you have neither; but you're as poor as a rat, that's very certain, for I never knew a literary man who wasn't; but, never mind, come along with me and I will get you out of the cold." I followed him to a desk near the window. He took pen and paper, and there and then wrote me out a check for £5,000,000 sterling upon the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. "Take that, old boy," he said, "and be sure that you make them pay you in gold, for their 'flimsies' are only fit to light your pipe with. Good-bye! When you want a million or two drop me a line." I thanked him heartily and off he went. But mark the craft of the man. I was in eager conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Emperor of all the Russias and King Nebuchadnezzar, when I felt a gentle tap upon my shoulder. Turning round I saw my benefactor. He winked slyly, and with finger on his lip beckoned me mysteriously into a corner. "Look here," he said, when I had followed him to his retreat; richest men in the world may be in temporary want of cash. That is my case. I think I understood you to say you had a matter of three halfpence about you. Lend it to me, and you shall have interest at the rate of 10 per cent. per annum." Dazzled by the prospect of so profitable an investment, I lent him the money. Beaming and blooming all over with happiness, my little friend bounded off like an antelope (fat,) and from that day to this I have never laid eyes upon him. Nor have I heard anything about either my principal or my interest. "Ah!" thought I to myself, "how 66 "the many men there be in full possession of their senses who are not half so happy as that hair-brained but sunny-hearted financier!" No wonder that confirmed "They dwell," observed madmen live to great ages. to me the physician of a celebrated asylum, “in an ideal world of their own. Take them out of it; restore them to reason; let them see life as it really is and the sight would kill them. They would die in four and twenty hours." It is worthy of remark that-except, perhaps, in the case of poor Ophelia and one or two others who are the martyrs of melancholia-people who go mad upon the stage are always the merrier for their madness. It is "de rigueur" that a demented woman shall come on in a garland of straw, and tear it to pieces before she goes off. She invariably laughs and dances, and looks as radiant as a sunbeam. 66 There," exclaims Mr. Puff in The Critic, when Tilburina has thus demeaned herself to the infinite enjoyment of the audience, "could you ever wish to see anybody madder than that." A white dress is also essential to lunacy, and with reference to the more or less haughty airs that the insane assume, whether upon the stage or in real life, it has been observed, drolly enough, that some people go mad in white muslin, others in white satin. But whether in muslin or satin their happiness appears to increase according as-to quote the tall language of Mr. Gladstone-" they rise higher into the regions of transcendental obscurantism." The reason why the mad must of necessity be happier than the sane is, that the latter are subject to those sad vicissitudes of fate of which the former know nothing. Bankruptcy, whether national or personal, and the long train of sorrows consequent on the loss of friends, the perfidy of foes, and the malignant freaks of destiny are powerless to sadden the soul of him who has made unto himself a fantastic empire, where he rules with undisputed sway. It is the sane who are hurt by the slings and, arrows of outrageous fortune. Your intrenchant lunatic laughs at these things, so true is it, as already quoted, that, “there is a pleasure, sure, in being mad which none but madmen know." The reader is at liberty to draw what inferences he pleases respecting the mental condition of the writer. RAMSGATE ON HEr good BEHAVIOR. "OH! "Yes, H! solitude, where are the charms that sages have found in thy face?" In Ramsgate. "What? Ramsgate, in the Isle of Thanet?" to be sure." "You never mean it?" แ "Ay, but I do." "What!" you again exclaim in amazement, "Ramsgate, the roaring, the rollicking, the rampant! Ramsgate, swarming with excursionists, nigger melodists, brass bands, street preachers, showmen, tumblers, tramps, pick-pockets and tract distributors! Ramsgate, whose streets are crowded with flies and omnibuses, whose sea is cut up into lanes and alleys of bathing machines, and whose sands are all alive with children and nurses! You don't mean to tell me that that is the Ramsgate where the charms of solitude are to be found?" "No; I do not. I never said so. You take me up before I have fallen. The Ramsgate you depict is hateful to me as the gates of Orcus. You are |