attention, but stranger things, not so accompanied, pass by unnoticed.
So it was that this house remained in this state
for years, without anyone asking why it was so. At length in formation was received that an insane person was incarcerated within its desolate looking walls. In company with a Justice of the Peace and others, I obtained admission into the house,
and, by forcing a door, into the chamber of the anchorite. Here in gloomy mistrust and dislike of all mankind he had secluded himself for five years. Little of his history was known, except that he had travelled in all parts of the world, had returned to find great domestic affliction, and from that time had shut himself in one room ; the bare necessaries of life being Sup
plied to him by relatives who connived at his eccentricity, one of whom scarcely more sane than himself, also occupied a room in this strange home. It is astonishing that with a penurious diet, and absence of all comfort, and an absolute want of fresh
air and exercise, he retained health for so long a time. Had it not been for this self-inflicted misery and incarceration, it would have been difficult to certify that this poor man was
insane. He disliked his fellow men, and shut himself up from them ; that was all. Although not a rich man, he had property; and while it was under contemplation how he could be rescued from his voluntary misery, some relations took him under their kind protection. Had this man possessed the passionate eloquence of Timon, and been exposed to severe incitements to its use, by irritating invasions on his misanthropic privacy, he might have declaimed as Timon did ; if Timon indeed did declaim ; if silence indeed is not the
natural state of misanthropy, and all the eloquence of this drama that of the author, rather than of the character.
The character which Shakespeare has delineated in Timon, is remarkably enough the subject of the chef d'oeuvre of French comedy. The Misanthrope of Molière, however, is in many respects, a very distinct personage from
