audible and impressive. It is the ebullition of an uncontrolled and ruling passion.

A fine eyebrow was greatly admired by the ancients, and Shakespeare, well aware of the flattering tongue of the lover, speaks of his "woful ballad," addressed to this particular object of female beauty. So Anacreon, directing an artist how to delineate his mistress, says, as Moore translates :—

MERCUTIO.

"Let her eyebrows sweetly rise,

In jetty arches o'er her eyes,
Gently in a crescent gliding,

Just commingling, just dividing!

What care I,

What curious eye doth quote deformities?
Here are the beetle brows, shall blush for me.

Romeo and Juliet, i., 4.

So in the old black-letter ballad entitled The Peerless Paragon :"Her beetle brows all men admire."

The eyelid, also, is thus mentioned by Shakespeare:

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes!

With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side!
His youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

Shakespeare refers to the Il Pantalóne, or old man of Italian comedy, usually represented dressed in a pair of pantaloons and slippers. In the Taming of the Shrew (iii., 1) be again refers in this sense, to "the old Pantaloon." With the approach of age, all the animal senses begin to lose their wonted vigour. Sight fails, and reading glasses or spectacles are soon in requisition to lend most acceptable aid to the impaired sense. In old age, the

circulation of the blood becomes sluggish, the muscles waste away, and fresh supplies of nutritious juices diminish. Even the organs of the voice become feeble and impaired. In young persons, previous to the age of puberty, the "childish treble" is particularly discernible. The recurrence of this in the decline of life is a striking circumstance, and admirably introduced by Shakespeare on this occasion. The windpipe, through which the breath passes from the lungs to the organs of enunciation, is sensibly affected, and the consequent inharmonious cadence, that indubitable mark of senility, cannot escape the notice of the most careless observer. Shakespeare notices this oral change in another play :

And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstring'd viol, or a harp;

Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up,

Or being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony!

Richard II., i., 3.

Shakespeare's description of the closing scene of life, second childishness, and mere oblivion, wanting teeth, eyes, taste, everything, is an affecting picture of debility and decay. In other places, our poet has depicted old age with similar admirable nicety of observation of human nature.

Not know my voice! O Time's extremity!

Hast thou so crack'd and splitted my poor tongue
In seven short years, that here my only son
Knows not my feeble key of untun'd cares?
Though now this grained face of mine be hid
In sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow,
And all the conduits of my blood froze up;
Yet hath my night of life some memory,
Mine wasting lamp some fading glimmer left,
My dull deaf ears a little use to hear,
All these old witnesses-I cannot err,
Tell me thou art my son Antipholus !

Comedy of Errors, v., 1.

I have liv'd long enough-my way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf!
And that which should accompany Old Age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends;

I must not look to have-but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep-mouth honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not!

Macbeth, v., 3.

These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent,
Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent!
Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief,
And pithless arms, like to a withered vine
That droops his sapless branches to the ground;
Yet are these feet, whose strengthless stay is numb,
Unable to support this lump of clay;

Swift winged with desire to get a grave,

As witting I no other comfort have.

Henry VI., Part I., ii., 5.

For ere the six years that he hath to spend,
Can change their moons, and bring their times about,
My oil-dried lamp, and time-bewasted light,
Shall be extinct with Age and endless night!

To spend that shortness basely, were too long

If life did ride upon a dial's point,

Still ending at the arrival of an hour!

Having now discussed those passages in Shakespeare's works which relate to the animal senses and mental powers of man in a state of health, let us now examine into the poet's knowledge of those senses and powers in a state of derangement and disease.

"Of all the powers of the human mind," observes Mr. Parker, "the imagination appears to be the most subject to injury. The fantastic illusions and ideal transformations, which are by far the most frequent forms of mental derangement, are solely ascribable to lesions of this

faculty. How pathetic and how true is Ophelia's description of the unhinged mind :—

That noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune* and harsh ;

*

*

*

Blasted with ecstacy.

Perfectly just is this comparison of the mind of the insane. It still possesses all its faculties, like the octave of bells, its full complement of notes; but their concord is destroyed, their harmony lost: its workings hurt us by pain, instead of entrancing us by pleasure. * * * That species of disordered intellect termed, by authors, mania mitis-roving or restless melancholy-affords one of the best subjects for the illustration of the fancy of the insane. Let us take a medical description of it, and see how closely the creations of the poet resemble the natural pictures from which they are copied. 'These people wake as others dream. Though they talk with you and seem to be very intent and busy, they are only thinking of a toy; and still that toy runs in the mind, whatever it be—that fear, that suspicion, that agony, that vexation, that cross, that castle in the air, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream.'t The kind and degree of this craziness will vary from the previous constitution of the mind, from its natural bias, and from the causes which produced the mental aberration. Ophelia, though a fictitious example, is one strictly analogous to the descriptions of the malady given by authors, and a faithful representation of nature.

"That form of insanity under which Ophelia laboured, has been termed monomania; that is, the hallucination is confined to one idea, or a small number of ideas. This species of disordered intellect is in direct proportion as regards the frequency of its occurrence, with the development of the intellectual faculties, and the progress of civilization; in which the play of these faculties becomes so much modified by the nature of the objects which surround them, and upon which they are exercised. No person can fancy a North American savage a monomaniac from sentimental love, or a New Zealander rendered insane from disappointed ambition, or the success of an opposite party in politics. This disorder is essentially dependant upon the passions, which themselves are the result of the moral relations which connect mankind, and by which they are bound in one great community. It is the child of the affections, the creature of sentiment; and he who wishes to become acquainted with its phenomena must make the heart of man his study, and gain an intimate acquaintance with those infinite varieties of human feeling which lie too deep for the eye of the vulgar and common-place observer to analyze.

"The whole soul of the gentle Ophelia appears to have been absorbed

The quartos read time.

+ The Study of Medicine, by John Mason Good.

in her passion for Hamlet, which was unable to bear up against the double misfortune of his declaration of 'I lov'd you not,' and the counterfeit insanity, to her real, which was assumed for the furtherance of his designs. Her dejection consequent upon this shows us, at once, the bent and tenor of her affections.

Oh! what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,

The observ'd of all observers! quite, quite down!

And I of ladies most deject and wretched,

That suck'd the honey of his music vows.

“The professions of affection on the part of Hamlet had been followed by contumely and insult, and her mind could no longer retain its sanity when she witnessed the murder of her father by the very hand that was presented for her acceptance. Although the insanity on the part of Ophelia does not take place till after the murder of Polonius, and appears to have been more immediately caused by that event-still we find her wandering imagination weaving all her misfortunes into one thread, and twining it round the predominating passion of her love for Hamlet :

He's dead and gone, lady, he's dead and gone,

At his head a grass green turf, and at his heels a stone;

alluding to her father, doubtless, since Hamlet was yet living; but in the next scene, the idea of her lover intrudes, and she is introduced strewing the tomb of old age with tokens that are cast only upon the grave of youth and beauty :

And again:

Larded all with sweet flowers

Which bewept to the grave did go
With true-love showers.

White the shroud as mountain snow,

white being the peculiar mourning colour for the young. This feature of her diseased fancy—this wandering and mixture of ideas of opposite characters-this investment of one circumstance with attributes belonging to another, has never been more truly described-never more beautifully illustrated than in the character of Ophelia.

"In all cases of mental alienation from disappointed affection, or from any other cause in which love is the predominant feeling, prior to the hallucination, the object of this passion mixes itself with all the wanderings of the maniac, and all the vigour of a morbid imagination is taxed to invest it with every ideal beauty. He is the god of their dreams and the idol of their waking hours; the maniac chants songs of his virtues, weaves garlands for his brows, decks the board for his return—at one moment arraying herself in bridal garments for the wedding, and the next clad in weeds, and following him in fancy to the grave. This fact, which