CHAPTER XI.

THE INSANITY OF AVARICE.

Avarice in the Insane-Curious Anecdotes of Lunatics-The Miser of St. Petersburg-His singular Life, and enormous WealthHis Loan to Catharine, Empress of Russia-The Miser's Watchdog-Its death-The Miser becomes his own Housedog to save the cost of another -Col. Dogherty of the Royal Marines-His singular character-Michael Dudley, the Irish Miser, and his one hundred pound note-The-Miser of Bloomsbury-Sheldon, the Miser of Kentish Town-Indications of Insanity-The effects of Avarice on the Mind-Avarice a prolific cause of Insanity, &c.

LIKE all other faculties and propensities of the human mind, the mania to acquire sometimes becomes a mental disease, and outsteps the control of the better feelings. The asylums for the insane contain numerous and remarkable instances of the morbid workings of this ignoble love of gold. Wretches of the most abject misery— imbecile and insane-will sometimes display the utmost craft and circumspection in the gratification of this ruling passion of their minds. As a monomania, it is too lamentably common; for we must regard the man, who, whilst in possession of an ample fortune, still strives by the most

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sordid parsimony, and the most disreputable cunning, to increase his hoards, as one whose mind is impaired, or whose passion for gold has produced a mental aberration. The proprietor of a private lunatic asylum once related to us some singular anecdotes of this passion, as manifested by his unfortunate patients. One of them had been a noted miser years before he became an inmate of the asylum; and a sudden and unforeseen loss which he had sustained, was supposed to have been the cause of his insanity. His whole soul had been centred in his gold, and deprived of his treasure, his mind became a total wreck; in his lucid intervals he would grow desponding, and abandon himself to the most lamentable despair; he would pine and fret; sob like a child deprived of its bauble, and then, in the paroxysm of his grief, rave into frantic madness; clutch hold of his keepers and denounce them as robbers, and seeking some worthless object that happened to be at hand, he would guard it with the most tenacious ferocity, declaring that it was his bag of gold, and that he would rather part with life, than part with that. Another poor wretch used to wander about the garden of the asylum in search of pebbles, which happened by their rotundity to call up to his mind the recollection of coin; these he would seek for with persevering industry, and, when discovered, he would secret them about his clothes with the greatest caution, and after a time bury them in a particular spot

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in the garden, and he always manifested the most intense anxiety if any of the other patients happened to wander near the place of his secret hoards. He was generally harmless in his manner, but he was always excited into passion, if by any chance his pursuits were interfered with, or his fictitious coin disturbed by his unfortunate companions.

Many years ago, there lived in a large, cheerless and dilapidated, old house in St. Petersburg, a wretched miser. He confined himself to one room, and left the rest of the rambling edifice to moulder into ruin; he cared for no comfort, and deprived himself even of those things which the poorest regard as the necessaries of life; he seldom lit a fire to repel the dampness, which, hung on the walls of his solitary chamber, and a few worthless objects of furniture was all that the room contained. Yet to this singular being the Empress Catherine the Second owed a million of rubles. His cellar, it was said, contained casks full of gold, and packages of silver were stowed away in the dismal corners of his ruinous mansion. He was one of the richest men in Russia. He relied, for the safety of his hoards, upon the exertions of a huge mastiff, which he had trained to bark and howl throughout the night, to strike terror into the hearts of thieves. The miser outlived the dog; but he disliked to part with any portion of his treasure in the purchase of another cur, and he resolved to save his

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COLONEL O'DOGHERTY.

money by officiating as his own watch dog. Every morning, and every evening, would that insane old man wander about his dismal habitation, barking and howling in imitation of his recent sentinel.

Perhaps a more decided manifestation of the insanity of avarice was exemplified in the life of LieutenantColonel O'Dogherty, of the Royal Marines. He died in February, 1819, near Landrake. For more than twenty years he was in the habit of visiting Plymouth Market, and he always made his appearance, mounted on an old hack as lean as Rosinante. The singularity of his dress, and the eccentricity of his manners, soon obtained for him the reputation of a miser. He generally wore a nightcap, tied round his head, which had evidently been for years a stranger to the wash-tub; an old hat, quite bare of nap, and brimless; a rough waistcoat, the original texture of which it would have puzzled the most sagacious to have discovered-so numerous were its patches and so various its hues; a greasy leather pair of breeches; an old coat, which no Jew would have rescued from the kennel, and a pair of shattered shoes bound round with huge haybands, formed the usual habiliments of this singular character. On his last visit to Plymouth, a week or two before his death, thus arrayed, he seated himself on the steps of the Plymouth Telegraph Office to eat an apple, which probably, was designed to satisfy his hunger during the greatest portion of the day. Yet,

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whilst practising this wretched penury, he possessed freehold property of considerable value, amply sufficient to have maintained him in comfort, and in a dignity befitting the squire of his village. He chose, however, to forsake the family mansion, and took up his abode in a small cottage in its immediate vicinity. A most wretched hovel it was, without a pane of glass in the windows, but with innumerable inconvenient apertures in the roof. He always kept the door closely barred and blocked up, and he used to get in and out of his house through the bedroom window, with the aid of a ladder; this he would at night draw up after him, and seek his repose on a bundle of dirty straw, huddled into one corner of his room.

We e may observe too, indications of an unsound mind in the senseless manner in which some misers have been known to gratify their love of hoarding; in the case of John Little, and several others, mentioned in our former chapters, we have seen the miser gratifying his propensity to hoard, when, by so doing, he necessarily entailed a pecuniary loss. We have a curious illustration of this, in the case of Michael Dudley, an Irishman, who was robbed in the year 1831. It seems, from the report of the trial of the thieves, which appeared in the papers of the time, that he had been. robbed of an old pocket book, containing notes to the value of one hundred and sixty pounds, among which