disease; but it is not so in numberless instances of chronic
mania, nor in melancholia or partial insanity. The dramatic representations which are in vogue in some asylums prove the power of attention and memory preserved by many patients; indeed, the possessor of the most brilliant memory we ever met with was a violent and mischievous maniac.
He would
quote page after page from the Greek, Latin, and French classics. The Iliad, and the best plays of Molière in particular, he seemed to have at his fingers' ends. In raving madness, however, the two symptoms referred to by Hamlet are as a rule present.
The pulse is accelerated, and the attention is so
distracted by thick-flowing fancies that an account can scarcely be given of the same matter in the same words.
It is, there
fore, to this form alone that the test of verbal memory applies. The death of “the unseen good old man” Polonius, which Hamlet in his “lawless fit” and “brainish apprehension” had effected, adds to the alarm of the King, already excited by the “pranks too broad to bear with ” of the play. The courtiers and the Queen do not seem to have inquired how it was that the King was so marvellously distempered with choler, where fore he became so much offended with the catastrophe of the play. Like good courtiers, they accept his humour un questioning. Now, however, the King has a good presentable excuse for alarm.
“O heavy deed It had been so with us, had we been there: His liberty is full of threats to all;
To you yourself, to us, to every one. Alas ! how shall this bloody deed be answer'd 7 It will be laid to us, whose providence Should have kept short, restrain'd, and out of haunt,
This mad young man : but, so much was our love, We would not understand what was most fit ; But, like the owner of a foul disease, To keep it from divulging, let it feed
Even on the pith of life.”
