they are terrible. The mad folk seemed to me happy enough on the whole, perhaps. But the suffering of those conscious of being sound of mind, but very sick in body, yet treated as sound of body and sick in mind—the life of the same among the mad, baffles description. They must be driven mad there by the score. I know what it is for men; what must it be for women? Personally, I do not believe I could have borne another week of it, for heart and brain were strained almost to bursting. What would have happened to me I do not know, for I had lost all care for anything. Nor did the kindly doctor, under whose advice I was saved, ‘in spite of fortune,’ ay, and in spite of myself, pretend to know either. But he believes that I must have broken down utterly, probably from softening of the brain.

Sitting at my desk as I am sitting now, with the comforting pipe and jug of beer by my side (deadly poisons to me, both of them, I have been often assured), and with a profound and grateful sense of extreme physical wellbeing, it is difficult for me to believe that not so long ago I was pronounced to be suffering at different times or all at once from epilepsy, partial paralysis, fits, delusions, suicidal and homicidal mania, ‘voices’ (a very professional and dangerous piece of humbug, of which I shall have more to say presently), ‘visions’ (Anglicè, dreams), and the Lord knows what beside. As I was utterly prostrate from weakness, it reads like a dangerous complication; and I feel with pride that I may safely challenge Maria Jolly herself to the proof. It is something to have lived through all these maladies, and to be engaged in replenishing the welcome beer-glass, or, like the moralist of Thackeravian memory,

Alive and merry at—year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.

But it is not too much to say,—and I speak again the wise words of my good friend and doctor, not my own,—that there are at this present moment languishing in these places many men who might well have been rescued, may be even now (and a mob attack, Bastille fashion, upon the whole body of private asylums would, to my mind, do as much good as harm),—men who might well have been spared and saved to do good work in the world, but who now lie as helpless as the enchanter at the feet of Vivien in the hollow oak—

Lost to life and use, and name and fame.

II.

Since I finished the first chapter of this discourse of mine, some of the few friends to whom I confided my intention of committing my experiences to the dangerous form of the litera scripta have been inclined to remonstrate with me for my audacity. Indeed, they seemed to think that there was something very wrong about the whole thing; that I should in some subtle way be breaking a confidence which should be devoutly kept—with myself, I suppose; and that the secrets of the prison-house of lunacy should be as sacred as the mysteries of Ceres of old. Whether, when these papers shall have been published, they will punish me in the Horatian fashion, and forbid me to stretch my legs under the same mahogany, or tempt the fragile bark in their company, I cannot say. But I am at a loss to see my crime. I feel disposed to quote a saying of Shirley Brooks in Punch, which always struck me as one of his funniest, when, in answer to numerous inquiries why his famous paper was published on Wednesday, and dated a Saturday in advance, he simply wrote in his ‘Punch’s Table-talk,’ ‘What the deuce is it to anybody?’ And I repeat what I said or implied in my first chapter, that as the strange experience recedes into the past, and the painful sense of insecurity dies out which at first it left behind, the blessed spirit of fun comes to my assistance, and the ‘humour of it’ affects me as much as Corporal Nym.

I rejoice in agreeing with a friend of mine, who, in talking the thing over, said to me, ‘The worst of you is, you are rather brutally sane.’ And the absurdity of any connection between myself and a lunatic asylum strikes me so forcibly that I begin to rub my eyes and ask myself whether it all really happened. It seems some degrees less real than it did even when I finished the last chapter. So I cannot get on the same standpoint as my friends, or discover that I am hurting my own feelings by my own disclosures, as they appear to think that I must. If I hurt those of anybody else it is neither fault nor affair of mine. There are unfortunately too many people in the world who cannot be supposed to have any to hurt. And to expect that a scribe should refrain from making capital of such an adventure is to ask too much of mercenary humanity. When various angry designs upon the law, for actions for false imprisonment, had given way to the reflection that the justice which got me into the mess was not likely to set me right afterwards, and it had struck me forcibly that it would be better to sit down and calmly to narrate my ‘travels in the dark land’ than to pay for the chance of redress, I grew very comfortable about the whole matter.

Men have travelled, and fought, and got besieged, and shut themselves up among the paupers, and done many strange things before this, for the mere purpose of writing books about their doings. But I feel sure that no man ever submitted to be treated as a lunatic with that view; for if he had he might never have escaped, had he been as sane as I, to tell his story. I know that for some time I might have been under the impression (which a friend of mine, who once paid a visit to the asylum, told me had been decidedly his) that the house-doctor, whose business it was to cure us, and above all to set us free, was one of the most remarkable madmen in the place. Well do I remember how, when I sank into a state of depression and absence of mind over the billiard-table on the tenth repetition of some especially dull old story of his, and quite forgot to score, this doctor reported me to my relatives, and I dare say to her Majesty’s Commissioners, as having ‘fallen into a dangerous condition of torpor.’ Torpor was the word.

De Quincey himself, with all his power of eloquence and word-painting, might have found even the dreams of an opium-eater less difficult to fix and to describe than the marvellous fancies and dissolving views of hypochondria, when it passes from the domain of fancy into that of real illness. In that earlier and fanciful stage it may or may not be conquerable by that effort of the will which is so easy to preach and so hard to practise; but in the second it is, save by the action of what I suppose I must call—in days when a higher and a nobler Name is something out of date in the ‘best circles’—the vis medicatrix ‘Naturæ,’ practically incurable. The doctors, who know what Galen knew and no more, but apparently believe in themselves none the less even for the teaching of Molière, are powerless before it. Their kindness of heart abounds—as, thank God, there is much of it everywhere—but their skill does not keep pace with it. One of the kindest of them whom I know, and I think the most sensible, told me that he had once under his care a lady who was suffering from hypochondria in a severe form. She recovered; and some time afterwards she met with an injury to the spine, of which she died in great pain. When she was dying she told him that her sufferings were as nothing to what she remembered of the mental pain