saving of expense to parties, few legal changes have given more universal satisfaction than this measure of Lord Lyndhurst. But there are upwards of 4000 lunatics confined as private patients in England, who are not under the care of the Lord Chancellor; and as the person and property of every individual lunatic is placed by express authority from the Crown under his charge, we think that the estates of these lunatics should not be left to the absolute control of their relatives. Although it must be quite unnecessary to hold commissions in the case of every one of these 4000 lunatics, still some intermediate inquiry and protection, as suggested by the Report, appears to be urgently called for.

It appears from the Reports of Committees that there were in the metropolitan district, in 1807, 17, and in 1815, 24, and in the provinces in 1807, 28, and in 1815, 38 licensed houses for the reception of the insane. The Report of 1815 notices that no returns had ever been received from any part of Wales.' There are now in the metropolitan district 37, and in the provinces 99, making together 136 licensed houses. The Reports of 1815 and 1827 contain accounts of abuses and cruelties of the grossest character in the houses then licensed. Although the county and large public asylums, and the better classes of licensed houses for private patients, are in general well conducted, it is manifest from the present Report, that, with few exceptions, the licensed receptacles for the insane poor are, notwithstanding the visitation to which they have been subjected from the year 1828, now wanting in almost everything that is essential to preserve the bodily health of their patients, and quite unfit for the relief or cure of mental diseases,-nay, that the system of treatment in many of them is at this day wantonly cruel. When we consider the numbers of the lunatics in these disgraceful establishments, the forlorn condition of the insane poor in those numerous counties which have provided no proper receptacles for them, the state of those counties which, having erected asylums, have permitted them, from being crowded with incurable cases, to become almost useless for the purposes of cure, and the very large expenditure at which county asylums have hitherto been erected and conducted, we feel confident that these and other matters which have been submitted by the Commissioners to the consideration of the Lord Chancellor must henceforth cease to be subjects of interest for a few private philanthropists alone. The comments of the Commissioners have, as might be expected, given offence to a few individual magistrates. We trust that the country and Parliament will disregard all inferior considerations, and will calmly and seriously contemplate the importance and magnitude of the subject which has been submitted to them.

Asylums are filled with the wrecks of human intellect, and of the dignity and happiness of man. Those whom rank, and wealth, and grace, and loveliness, and almost every gift of fortune had apparently formed for happiness and delight, here seek at best a sad shelter from the storms and agitations that have made shipwreck of their noblest endowment. Many whose gallant acts have exalted their names, whose genius has illumined the age in which they lived, whose writings have cheered and improved mankind, are found in these abodes. Let those who boast of man, so noble in reason, so infinite in faculties, in form and movement so express and admirable,' visit him in these receptacles of his desolation.

6

The disorders which deprive men of their reason and selfgoverning power, and render it a matter of necessity that they should be separated from society, are many and various; and it is a mistake to suppose that they can be described in a single definition, or with accuracy included under one name. A few pages in the Report are devoted to the description of these different trains of phenomena, which are, however, so briefly characterized that some persons have expressed disappointment who remember the treasures of knowledge which Esquirol collected from the limited ground of two or three asylums in France. It has been said that, with so ample a field of observation before them as all the public and private asylums in England have opened to the view of the Commissioners, a rich store of facts and inductions might have been expected for the extension of pathology and the history of mental disorders. It must be remembered that this document is a Report addressed to the Lord Chancellor, and that it is designed, not for the augmentation of science, but for practical and legal purposes-in short to present such a view of the actual condition of lunatics as may enable Parliament and the public to determine what alterations are called for in the existing provisions. We are, however, enabled to collect, from a section of the Report relative to the forms of mental disease, that nearly the same disorders of the understanding prevail in England as those which have long ago been recognised in foreign countries, and that they are found nearly in the same proportions, and produced by similar causes.

It is a matter of complaint in most of the large asylums that so great a proportion of space is occupied by cases of dementia. Dementia is not insanity properly so termed. It is the hopeless result of insanity; that final obliteration of the faculties which ensues on a long continued excitement of disordered feelings and disturbed processes of thought. To the head of mania and its sequel dementia may be referred two-thirds, and often threefourths,

fourths, of the cases in the great lunatic asylums. The instances of partial madness, whether included under monomania or moral insanity, are much less numerous. Insane persons have disordered intellects; but the demented, using the term in the technical sense, have no intellect at all. They are the mere outward shapes of men-moving bodies without minds. In the large hospital of Bicêtre a hundred such objects crowd round a stranger who happens to visit the place, and gazing at him with a vacant, unmeaning stare, remind him of bodies half re-animated from the grave. Physical activity in many of these instances survives the loss of intellect, and assumes the appearance of trick or habit. Some jump or run to and fro, or walk round perpetually in a circle. Some dance or sing; many talk incessantly in the most incoherent jargon, muttering half sentences and broken expressions, in which it is scarcely possible to discover any glimpse of meaning. Many sit in silence with a sedate and tranquil look, or a vacant smile, and scarcely pronounce a syllable for weeks or months, or even for years. In the last stage they become scarcely conscious of existence; unable to perform the commonest animal functions—even to eat, if food is not put into their mouths. Dementia, when it reaches the degree of complete fatuity, is often complicated with paralysis in some modification. How strange that great numbers of persons reduced to the state above described, or to one approaching to it, should be found to occupy, in nearly all the large asylums of this country, a great part of the space which ought to be allotted to recent and curable patients; while the latter, owing to this defect in the regulations respecting pauper lunatics, are detained in the confined and ill-adapted apartments of workhouses-till their discase, in the early stage one of the most curable, has passed into approaching, if not confirmed, dementia.

Cases of mania and melancholia, or excitable and desponding madness-which sometimes alternate with each other, and both terminate in dementia when protracted-comprehend, with the demented, perhaps nine-tenths of the inmates of asylums. Instances of monomania, properly so termed, are comparative rare phenomena. This term is correctly applied only to cases in which the intellect is sound, unless when exercised in a particular train of thoughts. There are many in every asylum whose minds are generally occupied by some favourite illusion, who fancy themselves kings or queens, or ministers of state-but most of these persons are in all other points equally insane: they are excitable and irritable, and are but one class of maniacs. Real monomania, according to Esquirol, who invented the term, is a disease like that of Baron Swedenborg, who was capable of performing

the

the duties of his office as minister to the King of Sweden, though he was so mad as to pull off his hat and make obeisance to Moses or Elijah in a crowded street, and fancied that the twelve apostles sat by him on twelve chairs in his apartment.

No other variety of mental disorder is calculated to occasion so much difficulty to commissioners, or other visitors of lunatic asylums, or to give rise to so much perplexity in courts of justice, as that unsoundness which is termed in the Report Moral Insanity.' It is defined to be an affection in which the sentiments, habits, and, generally speaking, the moral feelings, rather than the intellectual faculties, are in a preternatural and disordered state,' The common distinctive character of all these cases is of a negative kind, viz., that the faculties of the understanding remain apparently unimpaired, and that no delusive impression can be detected in the mind of the patient, which may account for the perversion of his moral dispositions. Cases of this description were formerly looked upon as unaccountable phenomena. They are, however, now recognised as a distinct form of mental disorder, in nearly all the public asylums. They are characterized by a total want of self-control, with an inordinate propensity to excesses of various kinds-among others, to intoxication. This is often followed by an attack of mania, which, however, speedily subsides when the patient is confined, but is generally reproduced by the same exciting cause soon after he is discharged.'

Many of the inmates who are apparently convalescent, whose conversation betrays no trace of intellectual aberration, and who present themselves to the Commissioners as having a right to their release, are still so far disordered in their moral dispositions and habits, that nothing but the control implied in their detention within a lunatic asylum keeps them from displaying their disease. Some of these persons are still extremely dangerous, and the discrimination of their state is one of the greatest practical difficulties connected with the management of the insane. The following instance is recorded in the Report:- An epileptic lunatic, sufficiently recovered to be allowed to work on the farm of the proprietor, escaped from Gateshead Fell. He was pursued, but the wife of the patient interceded, and, as he was apparently rational, he was allowed to remain at large. Only two nights after his escape he murdered his wife and daughter in a most horrid manner. A case recorded in the Report of an American asylum is not less striking:-A black man, a lunatic, who was confined in an asylum, had followed the trade of a butcher. He had been confined many years, but from his showing no violence was considered harmless, and allowed the range of the asylum. One night the black butcher secreted a knife: he induced another

patient

patient to enter his cell, prevailed on him to lie down, and then cut his throat; he calmly cut him in quarters, and distributed the joints around his cell, as he had been in the habit of arranging his meat in his shop. He solicited the custom of his comrades, and to those who were chained he carried such portions as they desired. The keeper was disturbed by the cannibal rejoicings. On examining the cells he found one man missing. He asked the black butcher if he had seen him, and the latter replied that he had just sold the last joint. This is an extreme case, but instances are known in every large asylum, displaying a total perversion of all moral feelings and social affections while the sense and intellect survive, nay, are even lively and astute—a fact which ought to convince us that illusions and other palpable defects of the understanding are not the most essential and necessary concomitants of insanity.

ART. VI.-Fresco Decorations and Stuccoes of Churches and Palaces in Italy, during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, taken from the principal Works of the greatest Painters, drawn and engraved by Thurmer, Gutensohn, Pistrucci, Gruner, and others, with English Descriptions. By Lewis Gruner. And an Essay on the Ancient Arabesques, as compared with those of Raphael and his School. By A. Hittorff. With forty-six plates, &c. Folio. London, 1844.

THE century we live in is not more remarkable for its railways and marvels of science than for a re-action from preceding barbarism in matters of taste. In architecture the age is doing for London what Augustus did for Rome: 'gloriatus marmoream se relinquere quam lateritiam accepisset.' We have the finest street and the finest bridges in Europe, and the Corso is brought into Pall Mall. In painting and sculpture it is the same. It seems as yesterday when we had no National Gallery, and when admission to the British Museum was as difficult as to the gallery of a private nobleman. All the fine arts are on the advance; and as one art leads to another we are still to seek. We find it is not enough to build houses of parliament and palaces. They must be decorated as well as built, not by upholsterers, but secundum artem, i. e. by artists, and how to get them is the problem which our legislators and Commissioners of Fine Arts are endeavouring to solve. This necessity has given to fresco-painting a precedence in public notice and a pre-eminence of patronage it never before enjoyed, and raised an expectation that such liberal prizes, productive exhibitions, and efficient schools of design, all

directed