girls dress for the drive and the Station; returning home, without the men, they discuss the Station; all through the heat of the long day till lunch, they dawdle on beds and sofas, and read novels, with intermingled chat about the people they saw, going to the Station and returning; in the afternoon they drive, and call, and interchange ideas with their friends about the weather, the state of the roads, and the Station; who went to the city to-day, whom they met going and coming, who is coming up with the men to-night. Then comes the great event of the day, the going to the Station to fetch the men and whatever guests are expected. We were equal to the simple dresses of the ladies in the morning, so fresh and négligé, but we shall not attempt to describe the splendors of the afternoon toilettes. To say that they are appropriate, is to say nothing more than applies always to the dress of American ladies in public. Our ladies are always dressed appropriately-for something, but we too often find that it is not for the thing in hand. Still, the ladies of Salmagundi, and, no doubt, of other places, reason well, that the only use of dress is to make one conspicuous, and that since the only place in which they can be seen is in the shabby street that leads to the Station, they may as well waste their richness on the Irish air, as keep it locked up in their wardrobes and jewel-boxes.

WHAT a very unsatisfactory thing-from the common-sense point of view-is the life of the average American girl, in the country? How little amphibious she is. She knows, we may partly admit, what to do with herself in the winter, in town-has activities, occupations, resources there, such as they are, yet poor as they may be, such as keep her mind from utterly stagnating-but, in the country, she is an aimless, purposeless thing. It is not only the Stellas and Belindas that lead the doleful life we have sketched above; nor is it only in the mis-called country-places, near large cities, that such lives are led. In respect of resource and occupation, our American girls-rich and only well-to-do alike, in villas and in cottages-are far behind the English girls; much farther behind them than their brothers are behind the English boys. The American boy has games, sports, out-of-door pleasures enough. He has ball and cricket, swimming and nutting, riding and shooting, amusement and occupation for all the stages of his youth; but the American girl has only the mild excitement of croquet

at which, moreover, she is continually obliged, or thinks herself obliged, to appear in fulldress-or the occasional horse-back ride, or the still rarer opportunity to swim or skate. What then can she do in the country? What wonder if, away from Saratoga, Newport, Long Branch, Niagara, or such public places, with their "drives," and "hops," and "fancy balls," she finds the country a bore? She doesn't know what to do there. She has never been taught natural history, nor drawing; she cannot walk a mile, and does not choose to, if she could. She knows nothing about gardening-it breaks her back to weed; she does not even know some of the commonest flowers by name. She wonders why Eve was sorry to quit her country-home and go out into the world. To her that would have seemed no punishment at all. Is this dislike and unfitness for country-life in the majority of American girls the result of a deficient education, or of a want of physical health? We are inclined to trace it directly to the way in which they are educated, or, rather, not educated. What would be the success of a school in which girls should not merely be taught to learn, but to think; in which botany, geology, physical geography, should be taught by professors in the open air, in which, in short, the whole aim should be to make the girls sharers with their brothers in the use and enjoyment of the material world?

THE coincidence seems a little striking, that within a month we should have lost an important bit out of our scanty information with regard to Shakespeare, and should have lighted upon a poem by Milton, written probably with his own hand, and never before published. The discovery that the entries relating to Shakespeare's plays contained in certain manuscript accounts of the Revels at Court in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James the First are forgeries by a later hand than that which wrote the original documents, seems, if we may judge by the journals, to have excited very little interest in England, although it deprives the world of one of the few items of knowledge it possessed about a man who was enough of a myth already without having his personal identity still further attenuated by this unhappy discovery. The existence of the documents in question was first made known to the English public by a volume printed in 1842 for the Shakespeare Society: "Extracts from Accounts of the Revels at Court in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James the First, from the original of

fice-books of the Masters and Yeomen. With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Cunningham." The volume does not appear to have excited any suspicion; on the contrary, its contents were at once accepted with thankfulness, as a most valuable addition to our knowledge of Shakespeare, and, as the London Athenæum, in which journal the announcement of the discovery of the forgery first appeared, remarks, "It is not too much to say, that since the publication of the volume of 'Court Revels' the list of plays has been used to check controversy, and that every edition of Shakespeare's works, edited since 1842, has been modified more or less by that list. If the list is not genuine, every current editor of Shakespeare has been taken in, and all the editions will need amendment in important points." Among these editions are those of Mr. Dyce and Mr. Richard Grant White, both of whom make use of the documents as printed by Mr. Cunningham, with out any suspicion of their genuineness. This is excusable in the case of Mr. White, because he had not access to the originals; but Mr. Dyce might have been expected to make a closer investigation. It seems, however, that the original papers have been missing for many years. On a certain day in June last, some of them were offered for sale to the Manuscript Department of the British Museum; and on their being carried by Mr. Bond to the Record Office for verification, they were at once impounded as the property of the Government. A careful examination by experts has proved that some unknown hand has added to the original MS., upon two or three blank pages, the whole of the references to Shakespeare. Whether Mr. Peter Cunningham is suspected or not, we do not hear; nor, indeed, have we come across any reference to this matter since the original exposure of the fraud in the Athenæum of June 20th.

A MUCH greater stir has been made over the discovery of the poem by Milton. In the London Times of July 16th, Professor Henry Morley announced that on a blank page, at the end of a copy of Milton's early Poems, published in 1645, he had found a poem of 54 lines in a contemporary handwriting which he believed to be Milton's, and signed with his initials "J. M.," and the date 1647. The poem is called "An Epitaph," and its publication has given rise to one of the most animated literary skirmishes that has enlivened the world of London for many

a day. The combatants are Lord Winchilsea, Archdeacon Denison, Professor Masson, Professor Morley, Mr. Vernon Harcourt, Gerald Massey, Mr. Hepworth Dixon, Mr. Bond, Professor Brewer, and a half-score of others less known to fame, but some of them showing no little acuteness and learning. One of the most amusing incidents of the fight has been the display of presumptuous arrogance, conceit, and ignorance, made by Lord Winchilsea, who was the first in the field ridiculing the idea that the poem could ever have been written by Milton, and who persisted in following up his first letter by communications to the Times, each worse than the other in respect of bad taste, flippancy, and a really ludicrous ignorance of the peculiarities of Milton's style, though he professed to be a great admirer of his poetry. He found, however, that his successive attempts to get cut of the frying-pan only resulted in landing him into hotter and hotter fire, and he at length retired from the contest in a petulant note. It has not been pleasant to observe that of all the writers on this subject only one, Mr. Hepworth Dixon, has had the easy courage to rebuke this learned lord for his display of bad manners. Even Professor Morley praises the noble Earl's "courage," and Professor Masson, who, by the way, claims to have discovered the poem in the same book where Mr. Morley found it, ten years earlier, and who neither believes that Milton composed it, or wrote it there,-Mr. Masson expresses his enthusiastic delight over Lord Winchilsea's style of argument. Snobbery is still strong in England, and much is forgiven there to a title, yet we venture to assert that it will be long before Lord Winchilsea attempts to air his critical attainments again. He has proved in his own experience that "a little learning is a dangerous thing." As for the merits of the controversy, it is plain that, thus far, Mr. Morley has much the best of it, and he has lifted the subject above triviality and a mere antiquarian interest, by his manner of treating it. It seems to us that he has met every objection, not only with entire fairness and ingenuity, but with a real scholarship and a poetic appreciation that must add to his already considerable reputation. The poem itself is one of no little beauty, and though it has evidently not received the final touches from its author's hands, yet is one that, if it shall be finally judged to have been written by Milton, will deserve to be thought no mean addition to his minor poems.

In this paper I propose to show that mental and moral diseases are much more frequent in community than is commonly supposed; that persons afflicted with the incipient and milder phases of what we call insanity are all about us, on every hand, and mingle with success in the various relations of life; and that only in the severer and exceptional cases is it found necessary to confine them in public institutions, or place them under any form of special treatment or surveillance.

That all forins of mental and moral disease are symptoms of morbid conditions of the brain, is now as well established as any fact of science. The elaborate researches of Professor Schraeder van der Kolk, and other European observers, have shown most clearly that the brains of patients who die insane, idiotic, or imbecile, give evidence, on microscopic examination, of diseased conditions sufficient to account for all the symptoms they may have exhibited. Insanity, being then a symptom of disease of the brain, is not found among the inferior species, who have little or no nervous system, and only exceptionally among the higher orders of animals. It is comparatively rare among wild and barbarous tribes. As would logically be expected, its manifestations are

It

most frequent and most severe in civilized communities, and among the intellectual or ruling classes. Insanity increases in frequency and in violence with the progress of civilization, and is indeed a part of the price that we pay for intellectuality and refinement. was never before so common as at the present day, and it appears to be rapidly increasing and multiplying its phases in direct proportion to our progress in art, in science, in literature, in trade, in finance, and in all the departments of modern activity through which the brain is so constantly harassed and overworked. While we escape or recover from many of the inflammations and fevers that decimate the savage tribes, and are, on the whole, healthier and longer-lived, we are yet afflicted with a thousand phases of insanity to which they are comparatively strangers.

In order to understand the nature and the range of diseases of the brain, we should compare them with those of the other bodily organs. Take for illustration the very familiar symptom of disorder of the stomach and digestive apparatus-dyspepsia. In nearly all of the essential particulars it will be found to be analogous to insanity. Dyspepsia is not a disease as such, but is merely a symptom of some organic or functional

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disease of the digestive apparatus; so also insanity is merely a name given to the severer symptoms of disease of the brain. The diseases of the digestive organs are indicated by a wide range of symptoms, such as pain in the region of the stomach, headache, constipation, nervousness, and general debility; the disorders of the brain are also manifested by a complication of symptoms of which insanity is only the most marked and most commonly observed. Disturbances of the digestive tract sympathetically affect all other portions of the system; the same is true of disease of the brain. Dyspepsia is very often, and perhaps usually, the consequence of general debility; it is now well understood that attacks of insanity are preceded by constitutional feebleness. Dyspepsia is most frequent among civilized lands, and among those classes who are inclined to abuse their stomachs and overtask their nervous systems; insanity is preeminently the disease of civilization, and is very rarely met with except among those classes who overwork and over-worry their brains. Dyspepsia, in its carly stages, is amenable to treatment, but when long continued is very obstinate, and often incurable; insanity and all other manifestations of cerebral disease are relievable, and even curable in the early stages, especially in the young, but after they have become firmly scated in the aged, are exceedingly intractable. Dyspepsia is best treated by remedies directed to the stomach, combined with constitutional tonics; insanity likewise yields most rapidly to remedies that have both á specific action on the brain and a strengthening influence on the entire system.

It will be seen, then, that in their causation, their frequency, the circle of their influence, their duration, their influence on the general system, in the variety of the symptoms by which they are manifested, and the indications for and results of treatment, the diseases of the brain and digestive apparatus are closely parallel. Insanity is, in short, a dyspepsia of the brain. Any injurious cause acting in the brain-such as poi

sons in the blood, congestion, or the opposite condition, anæmia, wounds of the skull that affect the cranial contents, thickening, softening, atrophy, or sympathetic irritation from other organs, may render the processes of the mental and moral nature difficult and painful, just as análogous causes acting on the digestive system may similarly disturb the processes of digestion. The abnormal symptoms in the one case are commonly known as insanity, melancholy, hypochondriasis, imbecility, mania, and nervousness; in the other as dyspepsia, indigestion, constipation, liver-complaint, heartburn, and debility.

But the parallel between the diseases of the brain and digestive system may be extended still further, for it is evident, in view of what has been said, that the range of insanity and dyspepsia must be as wide as the morbid conditions of which they are the symptoms. We all know that there are almost innumerable degrees and varieties of dyspepsia, from the acute spasm that annoys us but for an instant to the protracted agony and emaciation of a lifetime. Between these two extremes there is an almost interminable variety of phases and degrees that dyspepsia may assume, corresponding to the different morbid conditions of the digestive organs. Just so there are innumerable varieties and degrees of insanity, from the momentary attacks of ungovernable rage to the perpetual frenzy of the madman. Be tween these two extremes there are as many phases and degrees as there are different morbid conditions that may be supposed to exist in the brain. But, as has been already remarked, the susceptibility of the brain to disease is as much greater than that of the digestive apparatus as its structure is more complicated, and its functions more important and more various. We should expect then that the symptoms of cerebral disease would be more numerous, more subtle, and more complicated than those of the diseases of digestion. We should expect that the incipient, transitory, and completely harmless cases of insanity (that term being used to cover all symp

toms of disease of the brain), would be very common among us, would complicate, to a greater or less extent, the every-day life of civilization. If now we look closely enough into this matter, if we study minutely the eccentricities, the vagaries, the manias, the passions, and the crimes of society, we shall find that, in many instances, they are explainable only on the theory I have here advanced. We shall find that among the higher orders of society, among our leaders in business, in literature, in art, in science, as well as among the ignorant, the simple, and the abandoned, there are thousands of sufferers from the incipient and fleeting or milder disease of the brain, who are thereby rendered more or less eccentric and whimsical, or ill-balanced and positively dangerous.

That eccentricity often becomes absolute mania is now conceded by all students of mental disease, and is pretty well understood by the people at large. The only question is, how great a degree of eccentricity may be allowed to coexist with a perfectly healthy brain. The true and philosophical answer to this query is, in general, that any desire, passion, emotion, or special aptitude may become a disease when indulged in too long, or too exclusively, or under unfavorable conditions. It is, of course, oftentimes very difficult to decide, in any given case, whether any marked peculiarity is the result of a very active and one-sided development of the brain, or of actual disease. The general principle on which our decisions must be based is, that when any feeling, passion, emotion, or even a special aptitude becomes absolutely ungovernable, so as to make its subject regardless of his own interests, or of the well-being of his friends; when, as it were, it absorbs the whole being, so as to destroy what we call common sense, blunts the reason and conscience, and urges on to a manner of life and to special deeds that are repugnant to the average intuition of mankind, then we have reason to suspect the existence of disease of the brain.

It will be objected, and with good reason, that the average sentiment and experience of mankind is a very indefinite standard by which to test the sanity of an individual. But, after all, it is by this same standard that we judge that any internal organ of the body is diseased. Recurring to our illustration of the diseases of the digestive apparatus, how is it that the physician can ascertain whether his patient is suffering from dyspepsia or not? Obviously, only by comparing the symptoms that the patient exhibits, and the feelings of which he complains, with the symptoms and feelings experienced by the average of persons who are free from dyspepsia. In precisely the same way we become informed of the existence of disease in all organs of the body that are hidden from actual inspection or physical examination. In our examination of the lungs we are, it is true, assisted by auscultation and percussion, but even the principle on which the diagnosis is made is simply the comparison of the sounds heard in the chest of the patient with those that obtain in the average of healthy lungs. The brain is enclosed by bony covering, and cannot be inspected during life, except in cases of injury. Its discases can therefore only be studied through the general symptoms.

It will also be objected to this test, that it has, over and over again, been proved to be very fallible; that the grossest mistakes have been and are continually being made through its use; that it has caused some of the most original and gifted minds of the world to suffer persecution as criminals or lunatics. This practical objection is a very serious one, but it will apply just as truly, though not to the same degree, to the ordinary methods of diagnosticating the maladies of any of the internal organs. Physicians have been making terrible blunders in regard to diseases for thousands of years, but in the main we rely upon them, and, in the main, they are pretty nearly correct. One important distinction, however, should not be forgotten. The dyspeptic patient