Lock and Key Library: Old Time English — Melmoth the Wanderer, part 2

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About the year 1677, Stanton was in London, his mind still full of his mysterious countryman.

This constant subject of his contemplations had produced a visible change in his exterior,--his walk was what Sallust tells us of Catiline's,--his were, too, the "faedi oculi."

He said to himself every moment, "If I could but trace that being, I will not call him man,"--and the next moment he said, "and what if I could?"

In this state of mind, it is singular enough that he mixed constantly in public amusements, but it is true.

When one fierce passion is devouring the soul, we feel more than ever the necessity of external excitement; and our dependence on the world for temporary relief increases in direct proportion to our contempt of the world and all its works.

He went frequently to the theaters, THEN fashionable, when "The fair sat panting at a courtier's play, And not a mask went unimproved away."

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It was that memorable night, when, according to the history of the veteran Betterton,* Mrs. Barry, who personated Roxana, had a green- room squabble with Mrs. Bowtell, the representative of Statira, about a veil, which the partiality of the property man adjudged to the latter.

Roxana suppressed her rage till the fifth act, when, stabbing Statira, she aimed the blow with such force as to pierce through her stays, and inflict a severe though not dangerous wound.

Mrs. Bowtell fainted, the performance was suspended, and, in the commotion which this incident caused in the house, many of the audience rose, and Stanton among them.

It was at this moment that, in a seat opposite to him, he discovered the object of his search for four years,--the Englishman whom he had met in the plains of Valencia, and whom he believed the same with the subject of the extraordinary narrative he had heard there.

* Vide Betterton's History of the Stage.

He was standing up.

There was nothing particular or remarkable in his appearance, but the expression of his eyes could never be mistaken or forgotten.

The heart of Stanton palpitated with violence,--a mist overspread his eye,--a nameless and deadly sickness, accompanied with a creeping sensation in every pore, from which cold drops were gushing, announced the.

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Before he had well recovered, a strain of music, soft, solemn, and delicious, breathed round him, audibly ascending from the ground, and increasing in sweetness and power till it seemed to fill the whole building.

Under the sudden impulse of amazement and pleasure, he inquired of some around him from whence those exquisite sounds arose.

But, by the manner in which he was answered, it was plain that those he addressed considered him insane; and, indeed, the remarkable change in his expression might well justify the suspicion.

He then remembered that night in Spain, when the same sweet and mysterious sounds were heard only by the young bridegroom and bride, of whom the latter perished on that very night.

"And am I then to be the next victim?"

thought Stanton; "and are those celestial sounds, that seem to prepare us for heaven, only intended to announce the presence of an incarnate fiend, who mocks the devoted with 'airs from heaven,' while he prepares to surround them with 'blasts from hell'?"

It is very singular that at this moment, when his imagination had reached its highest pitch of elevation,--when the object he had pursued so long and fruitlessly, had in one moment become as it were tangible to the grasp both of mind and body,--when this spirit, with whom he had wrestled in darkness, was at last about to declare its name, that Stanton began to feel a kind of disappointment at the futility of his pursuits, like Bruce at discovering the source of the Nile, or Gibbon on concluding his History.

The feeling which he had dwelt on so long, that he had actually converted it into a duty, was after all mere curiosity; but what passion is more insatiable, or more capable of giving a kind of romantic grandeur to all its wanderings and eccentricities?

Curiosity is in one respect like love, it always compromises between the object and the feeling; and provided the latter possesses sufficient energy, no matter how contemptible the former may be.

A child might have smiled at the agitation of Stanton, caused as it was by the accidental appearance of a stranger; but no man, in the full energy of his passions, was there, but must have trembled at the horrible agony of emotion with which he felt approaching, with sudden and irresistible velocity, the crisis of his destiny.

When the play was over, he stood for some moments in the deserted streets.

It was a beautiful moonlight night, and he saw near him a figure, whose shadow, projected half across the street (there were no flagged ways then, chains and posts were the only defense of the foot passenger), appeared to him of gigantic magnitude.

He had been so long accustomed to contend with these phantoms of the imagination, that he took a kind of stubborn delight in subduing them.

He walked up to the object, and observing the shadow only was magnified, and the figure was the ordinary height of man, he approached it, and discovered the very object of his search,--the man whom he had seen for a moment in Valencia, and, after a search of four years, recognized at the theater.

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"You were in quest of me?"

--"I was."

"Have you anything to inquire of me?"

--"Much."

"Speak, then."

--"This is no place."

"No place!

poor wretch, I am independent of time and place.

Speak, if you have anything to ask or to learn."

--"I have many things to ask, but nothing to learn, I hope, from you."

"You deceive yourself, but you will be undeceived when next we meet."

--"And when shall that be?"

said Stanton, grasping his arm; "name your hour and your place."

"The hour shall be midday," answered the stranger, with a horrid and unintelligible smile; "and the place shall be the bare walls of a madhouse, where you shall rise rattling in your chains, and rustling from your straw, to greet me,--yet still you shall have THE CURSE OF SANITY, and of memory.

My voice shall ring in your ears till then, and the glance of these eyes shall be reflected from every object, animate or inanimate, till you behold them again."

--"Is it under circumstances so horrible we are to meet again?"

said Stanton, shrinking under the full-lighted blaze of those demon eyes.

"I never," said the stranger, in an emphatic tone,--"I never desert my friends in misfortune.

When they are plunged in the lowest abyss of human calamity, they are sure to be visited by me."

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The narrative, when Melmoth was again able to trace its continuation, described Stanton, some years after, plunged in a state the most deplorable.

He had been always reckoned of a singular turn of mind, and the belief of this, aggravated by his constant talk of Melmoth, his wild pursuit of him, his strange behavior at the theater, and his dwelling on the various particulars of their extraordinary meetings, with all the intensity of the deepest conviction (while he never could impress them on any one's conviction but his own), suggested to some prudent people the idea that he was deranged.

Their malignity probably took part with their prudence.

The selfish Frenchman* says, we feel a pleasure even in the misfortunes of our friends,--a plus forte in those of our enemies; and as everyone is an enemy to a man of genius of course, the report of Stanton's malady was propagated with infernal and successful industry.

Stanton's next relative, a needy unprincipled man, watched the report in its circulation, and saw the snares closing round his victim.

He waited on him one morning, accompanied by a person of a grave, though somewhat repulsive appearance.

Stanton was as usual abstracted and restless, and, after a few moments' conversation, he proposed a drive a few miles out of London, which he said would revive and refresh him.

Stanton objected, on account of the difficulty of getting a hackney coach (for it is singular that at this period the number of private equipages, though infinitely fewer than they are now, exceeded the number of hired ones), and proposed going by water.

This, however, did not suit the kinsman's views; and, after pretending to send for a carriage (which was in waiting at the end of the street), Stanton and his companions entered it, and drove about two miles out of London.

* Rochefoucauld.

The carriage then stopped.

Come, Cousin," said the younger Stanton,--"come and view a purchase I have made."

Stanton absently alighted, and followed him across a small paved court; the other person followed.

"In troth, Cousin," said Stanton, "your choice appears not to have been discreetly made; your house has somewhat of a gloomy aspect."

--"Hold you content, Cousin," replied the other; "I shall take order that you like it better, when you have been some time a dweller therein."

Some attendants of a mean appearance, and with most suspicious visages, awaited them on their entrance, and they ascended a narrow staircase, which led to a room meanly furnished.

"Wait here," said the kinsman, to the man who accompanied them, "till I go for company to divertise my cousin in his loneliness."

They were left alone.

Stanton took no notice of his companion, but as usual seized the first book near him, and began to read.

It was a volume in manuscript,--they were then much more common than now.

The first lines struck him as indicating insanity in the writer.

It was a wild proposal (written apparently after the great fire of London) to rebuild it with stone, and attempting to prove, on a calculation wild, false, and yet sometimes plausible, that this could be done out of the colossal fragments of Stonehenge, which the writer proposed to remove for that purpose.

Subjoined were several grotesque drawings of engines designed to remove those massive blocks, and in a corner of the page was a note,--"I would have drawn these more accurately, but was not allowed a KNIFE to mend my pen."

The next was entitled, "A modest proposal for the spreading of Christianity in foreign parts, whereby it is hoped its entertainment will become general all over the world."

--This modest proposal was, to convert the Turkish ambassadors (who had been in London a few years before), by offering them their choice of being strangled on the spot, or becoming Christians.

Of course the writer reckoned on their embracing the easier alternative, but even this was to be clogged with a heavy condition,--namely, that they must be bound before a magistrate to convert twenty Mussulmans a day, on their return to Turkey.

The rest of the pamphlet was reasoned very much in the conclusive style of Captain Bobadil,-- these twenty will convert twenty more apiece, and these two hundred converts, converting their due number in the same time, all Turkey would be converted before the Grand Signior knew where he was.

Then comes the coup d'eclat,--one fine morning, every minaret in Constantinople was to ring out with bells, instead of the cry of the Muezzins; and the Imaum, coming out to see what was the matter, was to be encountered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in pontificalibus, performing Cathedral service in the church of St. Sophia, which was to finish the business.

Here an objection appeared to arise, which the ingenuity of the writer had anticipated.

--"It may be redargued," saith he, "by those who have more spleen than brain, that forasmuch as the Archbishop preacheth in English, he will not thereby much edify the Turkish folk, who do altogether hold in a vain gabble of their own."

But this (to use his own language) he "evites," by judiciously observing, that where service was performed in an unknown tongue, the devotion of the people was always observed to be much increased thereby; as, for instance, in the church of Rome,--that St. Augustine, with his monks, advanced to meet King Ethelbert singing litanies (in a language his majesty could not possibly have understood), and converted him and his whole court on the spot;--that the sybilline books.

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Cum multis aliis.

Between the pages were cut most exquisitely in paper the likenesses of some of these Turkish ambassadors; the hair of the beards, in particular, was feathered with a delicacy of touch that seemed the work of fairy fingers,--but the pages ended with a complaint of the operator, that his scissors had been taken from him.

However, he consoled himself and the reader with the assurance, that he would that night catch a moonbeam as it entered through the grating, and, when he had whetted it on the iron knobs of his door, would do wonders with it.

In the next page was found a melancholy proof of powerful but prostrated intellect.

It contained some insane lines, ascribed to Lee the dramatic poet, commencing, "O that my lungs could bleat like buttered pease," &c. There is no proof whatever that these miserable lines were really written by Lee, except that the measure is the fashionable quatrain of the period.

It is singular that Stanton read on without suspicion of his own danger, quite absorbed in the album of a madhouse, without ever reflecting on the place where he was, and which such compositions too manifestly designated.

It was after a long interval that he looked round, and perceived that his companion was gone.

Bells were unusual then.

He proceeded to the door,--it was fastened.

He called aloud,--his voice was echoed in a moment by many others, but in tones so wild and discordant, that he desisted in involuntary terror.

As the day advanced, and no one approached, he tried the window, and then perceived for the first time it was grated.

It looked out on the narrow flagged yard, in which no human being was; and if there had, from such a being no human feeling could have been extracted.

Sickening with unspeakable horror, he sunk rather than sat down beside the miserable window, and "wished for day."

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At midnight he started from a doze, half a swoon, half a sleep, which probably the hardness of his seat, and of the deal table on which he leaned, had not contributed to prolong.

He was in complete darkness; the horror of his situation struck him at once, and for a moment he was indeed almost qualified for an inmate of that dreadful mansion.

He felt his way to the door, shook it with desperate strength, and uttered the most frightful cries, mixed with expostulations and commands.

His cries were in a moment echoed by a hundred voices.

In maniacs there is a peculiar malignity, accompanied by an extraordinary acuteness of some of the senses, particularly in distinguishing the voice of a stranger.

The cries that he heard on every side seemed like a wild and infernal yell of joy, that their mansion of misery had obtained another tenant.

He paused, exhausted,--a quick and thundering step was heard in the passage.

The door was opened, and a man of savage appearance stood at the entrance,--two more were seen indistinctly in the passage.

"Release me, villain!"

--"Stop, my fine fellow, what's all this noise for?"

"Where am I?"

"Where you ought to be."

"Will you dare to detain me?"

--"Yes, and a little more than that," answered the ruffian, applying a loaded horsewhip to his back and shoulders, till the patient soon fell to the ground convulsed with rage and pain.

"Now you see you are where you ought to be," repeated the ruffian, brandishing the horsewhip over him, "and now take the advice of a friend, and make no more noise.

The lads are ready for you with the darbies, and they'll clink them on in the crack of this whip, unless you prefer another touch of it first."

They then were advancing into the room as he spoke, with fetters in their hands (strait waistcoats being then little known or used), and showed, by their frightful countenances and gestures, no unwillingness to apply them.

Their harsh rattle on the stone pavement made Stanton's blood run cold; the effect, however, was useful.

He had the presence of mind to acknowledge his (supposed) miserable condition, to supplicate the forbearance of the ruthless keeper, and promise complete submission to his orders.

This pacified the ruffian, and he retired.

Stanton collected all his resolution to encounter the horrible night; he saw all that was before him, and summoned himself to meet it.

After much agitated deliberation, he conceived it best to continue the same appearance of submission and tranquillity, hoping that thus he might in time either propitiate the wretches in whose hands he was, or, by his apparent inoffensiveness, procure such opportunities of indulgence, as might perhaps ultimately facilitate his escape.

He therefore determined to conduct himself with the utmost tranquillity, and never to let his voice be heard in the house; and he laid down several other resolutions with a degree of prudence which he already shuddered to think might be the cunning of incipient madness, or the beginning result of the horrid habits of the place.

These resolutions were put to desperate trial that very night.

Just next to Stanton's apartment were lodged two most uncongenial neighbors.

One of them was a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the madhouse as full of election and reprobation as he could hold,--and fuller.

He regularly repeated over the five points while daylight lasted, and imagined himself preaching in a conventicle with distinguished success; toward twilight his visions were more gloomy, and at midnight his blasphemies became horrible.

In the opposite cell was lodged a loyalist tailor, who had been ruined by giving credit to the cavaliers and their ladies,--(for at this time, and much later, down to the reign of Anne, tailors were employed by females even to make and fit on their stays),--who had run mad with drink and loyalty on the burning of the Rump, and ever since had made the cells of the madhouse echo with fragments of the ill-fated Colonel Lovelace's song, scraps from Cowley's "Cutter of Coleman street," and some curious specimens from Mrs. Aphra Behn's plays, where the cavaliers are denominated the heroicks, and Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough represented as going to meeting, their large Bibles carried before them by their pages, and falling in love with two banished cavaliers by the way.

The voice in which he shrieked out such words was powerfully horrible, but it was like the moan of an infant compared to the voice which took up and reechoed the cry, in a tone that made the building shake.

It was the voice of a maniac, who had lost her husband, children, subsistence, and finally her reason, in the dreadful fire of London.

The cry of fire never failed to operate with terrible punctuality on her associations.

She had been in a disturbed sleep, and now started from it as suddenly as on that dreadful night.

It was Saturday night too, and she was always observed to be particularly violent on that night,--it was the terrible weekly festival of insanity with her.

She was awake, and busy in a moment escaping from the flames; and she dramatized the whole scene with such hideous fidelity, that Stanton's resolution was far more in danger from her than from the battle between his neighbors Testimony and Hothead.

She began exclaiming she was suffocated by the smoke; then she sprung from her bed, calling for a light, and appeared to be struck by the sudden glare that burst through her casement.

--"The last day," she shrieked, "The last day!

The very heavens are on fire!"

--"That will not come till the Man of Sin be first destroyed," cried the weaver; "thou ravest of light and fire, and yet thou art in utter darkness.

--I pity thee, poor mad soul, I pity thee!"

The maniac never heeded him; she appeared to be scrambling up a staircase to her children's room.

She exclaimed she was scorched, singed, suffocated; her courage appeared to fail, and she retreated.

"But my children are there!"

she cried in a voice of unspeakable agony, as she seemed to make another effort;

"here I am--here I am come to save you.

--Oh God!

They are all blazing!

--Take this arm--no, not that, it is scorched and disabled-- well, any arm--take hold of my clothes--no, they are blazing too!

-- Well, take me all on fire as I am!

--And their hair, how it hisses!

--Water, one drop of water for my youngest--he is but an infant--for my youngest, and let me burn!"

She paused in horrid silence, to watch the fall of a blazing rafter that was about to shatter the staircase on which she stood.

--"The roof has fallen on my head!"

she exclaimed.

"The earth is weak, and all the inhabitants thereof," chanted the weaver; "I bear up the pillars of it."

The maniac marked the destruction of the spot where she thought she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below.

"There they go,-- one--two--three--all!"

and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a spent storm, as she imagined herself to "stand in safety and despair," amid the thousand houseless wretches assembled in the suburbs of London on the dreadful nights after the fire, without food, roof, or raiment, all gazing on the burning ruins of their dwellings and their property.

She seemed to listen to their complaints, and even repeated some of them very affectingly, but invariably answered them with the same words, "But I have lost all my children--all!"

It was remarkable, that when this sufferer began to rave, all the others became silent.

The cry of nature hushed every other cry,--she was the only patient in the house who was not mad from politics, religion, ebriety, or some perverted passion; and terrifying as the outbreak of her frenzy always was, Stanton used to await it as a kind of relief from the dissonant, melancholy, and ludicrous ravings of the others.

But the utmost efforts of his resolution began to sink under the continued horrors of the place.

The impression on his senses began to defy the power of reason to resist them.

He could not shut out these frightful cries nightly repeated, nor the frightful sound of the whip employed to still them.

Hope began to fail him, as he observed, that the submissive tranquillity (which he had imagined, by obtaining increased indulgence, might contribute to his escape, or perhaps convince the keeper of his sanity) was interpreted by the callous ruffian, who was acquainted only with the varieties of MADNESS, as a more refined species of that cunning which he was well accustomed to watch and baffle.

On his first discovery of his situation, he had determined to take the utmost care of his health and intellect that the place allowed, as the sole basis of his hope of deliverance.

But as that hope declined, he neglected the means of realizing it.

He had at first risen early, walked incessantly about his cell, and availed himself of every opportunity of being in the open air.

He took the strictest care of his person in point of cleanliness, and with or without appetite, regularly forced down his miserable meals; and all these efforts were even pleasant, as long as hope prompted them.

But now he began to relax them all.

He passed half the day in his wretched bed, in which he frequently took his meals, declined shaving or changing his linen, and, when the sun shone into his cell, he turned from it on his straw with a sigh of heartbroken despondency.

Formerly, when the air breathed through his grating, he used to say, "Blessed air of heaven, I shall breathe you once more in freedom!

--Reserve all your freshness for that delicious evening when I shall inhale you, and be as free as you myself."

Now when he felt it, he sighed and said nothing.

The twitter of the sparrows, the pattering of rain, or the moan of the wind, sounds that he used to sit up in his bed to catch with delight, as reminding him of nature, were now unheeded.

He began at times to listen with sullen and horrible pleasure to the cries of his miserable companions.

He became squalid, listless, torpid, and disgusting in his appearance.

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It was one of those dismal nights, that, as he tossed on his loathsome bed,--more loathsome from the impossibility to quit it without feeling more "unrest,"--he perceived the miserable light that burned in the hearth was obscured by the intervention of some dark object.

He turned feebly toward the light, without curiosity, without excitement, but with a wish to diversify the monotony of his misery, by observing the slightest change made even accidentally in the dusky atmosphere of his cell.

Between him and the light stood the figure of Melmoth, just as he had seen him from the first; the figure was the same; the expression of the face was the same,--cold, stony, and rigid; the eyes, with their infernal and dazzling luster, were still the same.

Stanton's ruling passion rushed on his soul; he felt this apparition like a summons to a high and fearful encounter.

He heard his heart beat audibly, and could have exclaimed with Lee's unfortunate heroine,--"It pants as cowards do before a battle; Oh the great march has sounded!"

Melmoth approached him with that frightful calmness that mocks the terror it excites.

"My prophecy has been fulfilled;--you rise to meet me rattling from your chains, and rustling from your straw--am I not a true prophet?"

Stanton was silent.

"Is not your situation very miserable?"

--Still Stanton was silent; for he was beginning to believe this an illusion of madness.

He thought to himself, "How could he have gained entrance here?"

--"Would you not wish to be delivered from it?"

Stanton tossed on his straw, and its rustling seemed to answer the question.

"I have the power to deliver you from it."

Melmoth spoke very slowly and very softly, and the melodious smoothness of his voice made a frightful contrast to the stony rigor of his features, and the fiendlike brilliancy of his eyes.

"Who are you, and whence come you?"

said Stanton, in a tone that was meant to be interrogatory and imperative, but which, from his habits of squalid debility, was at once feeble and querulous.

His intellect had become affected by the gloom of his miserable habitation, as the wretched inmate of a similar mansion, when produced before a medical examiner, was reported to be a complete Albino.

--His skin was bleached, his eyes turned white; he could not bear the light; and, when exposed to it, he turned away with a mixture of weakness and restlessness, more like the writhings of a sick infant than the struggles of a man.

Such was Stanton's situation.

He was enfeebled now, and the power of the enemy seemed without a possibility of opposition from either his intellectual or corporeal powers.

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Of all their horrible dialogue, only these words were legible in the manuscript, "You know me now."

--"I always knew you."

--"That is false; you imagined you did, and that has been the cause of all the wild .

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of your finally being lodged in this mansion of misery, where only I would seek, where only I can succor you."

--"You, demon!"

-- "Demon!

--Harsh words!

--Was it a demon or a human being placed you here?

--Listen to me, Stanton; nay, wrap not yourself in that miserable blanket,--that cannot shut out my words.

Believe me, were you folded in thunder clouds, you must hear ME!

Stanton, think of your misery.

These bare walls--what do they present to the intellect or to the senses?

--Whitewash, diversified with the scrawls of charcoal or red chalk, that your happy predecessors have left for you to trace over.

You have a taste for drawing--I trust it will improve.

And here's a grating, through which the sun squints on you like a stepdame, and the breeze blows, as if it meant to tantalize you with a sigh from that sweet mouth, whose kiss you must never enjoy.

And where's your library,--intellectual man,--traveled man?"

he repeated in a tone of bitter derision;

"where be your companions, your peaked men of countries, as your favorite Shakespeare has it?

You must be content with the spider and the rat, to crawl and scratch round your flock bed!

I have known prisoners in the Bastille to feed them for companions,--why don't you begin your task?

I have known a spider to descend at the tap of a finger, and a rat to come forth when the daily meal was brought, to share it with his fellow prisoner!

--How delightful to have vermin for your guests!

Aye, and when the feast fails them, they make a meal of their entertainer!

--You shudder.

--Are you, then, the first prisoner who has been devoured alive by the vermin that infested his cell?

--Delightful banquet, not 'where you eat, but where you are eaten'!

Your guests, however, will give you one token of repentance while they feed; there will be gnashing of teeth, and you shall hear it, and feel it too perchance!

--And then for meals--Oh you are daintily off!

--The soup that the cat has lapped; and (as her progeny has probably contributed to the hell broth) why not?

Then your hours of solitude, deliciously diversified by the yell of famine, the howl of madness, the crash of whips, and the broken-hearted sob of those who, like you, are supposed, or DRIVEN mad by the crimes of others!

--Stanton, do you imagine your reason can possibly hold out amid such scenes?

-- Supposing your reason was unimpaired, your health not destroyed,-- suppose all this, which is, after all, more than fair supposition can grant, guess the effect of the continuance of these scenes on your senses alone.

A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbors near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from YOU or THEM.

The time will come, when, from the want of occupation, the listless and horrible vacancy of your hours, you will feel as anxious to hear those shrieks, as you were at first terrified to hear them,--when you will watch for the ravings of your next neighbor, as you would for a scene on the stage.

All humanity will be extinguished in you.

The ravings of these wretches will become at once your sport and your torture.

You will watch for the sounds, to mock them with the grimaces and bellowings of a fiend.

The mind has a power of accommodating itself to its situation, that you will experience in its most frightful and deplorable efficacy.

Then comes the dreadful doubt of one's own sanity, the terrible announcer that THAT doubt will soon become fear, and THAT fear certainty.

Perhaps (still more dreadful) the FEAR will at last become a HOPE,--shut out from society, watched by a brutal keeper, writhing with all the impotent agony of an incarcerated mind, without communication and without sympathy, unable to exchange ideas but with those whose ideas are only the hideous specters of departed intellect, or even to hear the welcome sound of the human voice, except to mistake it for the howl of a fiend, and stop the ear desecrated by its intrusion,-- then at last your fear will become a more fearful hope; you will wish to become one of them, to escape the agony of consciousness.

As those who have long leaned over a precipice, have at last felt a desire to plunge below, to relieve the intolerable temptation of their giddiness,* you will hear them laugh amid their wildest paroxysms; you will say, 'Doubtless those wretches have some consolation, but I have none; my sanity is my greatest curse in this abode of horrors.

They greedily devour their miserable meals, while I loathe mine.

They sleep sometimes soundly, while my sleep is--worse than their waking.

They are revived every morning by some delicious illusion of cunning madness, soothing them with the hope of escaping, baffling or tormenting their keeper; my sanity precludes all such hope.

I KNOW I NEVER CAN ESCAPE, and the preservation of my faculties is only an aggravation of my sufferings.

I have all their miseries,--I have none of their consolations.

They laugh,--I hear them; would I could laugh like them.'

You will try, and the very effort will be an invocation to the demon of insanity to come and take full possession of you from that moment forever."

* A fact, related to me by a person who was near committing suicide in a similar situation, to escape what he called "the excruciating torture of giddiness."

(There were other details, both of the menaces and temptations employed by Melmoth, which are too horrible for insertion.

One of them may serve for an instance.

) "You think that the intellectual power is something distinct from the vitality of the soul, or, in other words, that if even your reason should be destroyed (which it nearly is), your soul might yet enjoy beatitude in the full exercise of its enlarged and exalted faculties, and all the clouds which obscured them be dispelled by the Sun of Righteousness, in whose beams you hope to bask forever and ever.

Now, without going into any metaphysical subtleties about the distinction between mind and soul, experience must teach you, that there can be no crime into which madmen would not, and do not, precipitate themselves; mischief is their occupation, malice their habit, murder their sport, and blasphemy their delight.

Whether a soul in this state can be in a hopeful one, it is for you to judge; but it seems to me, that with the loss of reason (and reason cannot long be retained in this place) you lose also the hope of immortality.

--Listen," said the tempter, pausing, "listen to the wretch who is raving near you, and whose blasphemies might make a demon start.

--He was once an eminent puritanical preacher.

Half the day he imagines himself in a pulpit, denouncing damnation against Papists, Arminians, and even Sublapsarians (he being a Supra-lapsarian himself).