three per cent. married, seventeen per cent. widows. The education and religious test we hold to be perfectly fallacious in the class to which this establishment is devoted, so we refrain from making comparisons on those heads.

It is now time for afternoon prayers-five o'clock-so we make our way to the chapel. There are two services daily the one at a quarter past eight in the morning, and the other at five o'clock in the afternoon. The Sunday services are at eleven o'clock and half-past five. A door in one of the corridors admitted us at once into the gallery of the chapel, from whence we could look down upon the remarkable congregation below us. Two things challenged our observation-the very great preponderance of females over males at the service (there must have been at least two hundred of the former and not above a dozen of the latter), and their devout and quiet demeanour. Here and there the blue dress of an attendant might be seen, but the behaviour of the patients quite justified the apparent freedom to which they were left. A former chaplain, the Reverend Mr. Hutton, on leaving his charge, has placed it on record that "the sermon and questions arising out of it will frequently form the subject of conversation next day; some of the patients take down the text regularly and systematically;" and, the reverend gentleman adds, "The services proceed with so much quiet and outward decorum, that, but for the dress and disposal of the congregation, I do not think any one present would be aware that they were not in an ordinary parish church, with an attentive and devout congregation."

The present respected chaplain, the Reverend Mr. Bullock, in his first report to the committee of visitors, says: "The cleanliness of the wards, the generally cheerful and contented appearance and manner of the patients, and their respectful behaviour to their superiors, under the total absence of restraint or severity of treatment, are facts which require to be known by personal experience before they can be duly appreciated or even fully believed. There is something marvellous to a stranger in the control, without apparent effort, held over forty or fifty insane persons by three or four attendants. It is, I suppose, the absence of unnecessary restraint which takes away the disposition to rebel. Nor is the orderly behaviour of the patients in chapel, their attentiveness, and the sincerity of devotion and interest in the services which many of them evince, less striking to a stranger or less encouraging to one who holds the office of ministering to them in spiritual things."

We were also much pleased by the affectionate and confidential bearing of these poor creatures towards their pastor, which he seems to encourage and reciprocate by his kind and feeling and patient way with them. His appearance is the signal for a general flocking round him, and cries of "Parson, I want to speak to you!" "Parson, I'm so glad you've come!" resound on all sides.

The sacrament is administered once a month, and the average number of communicants is about twenty-five. The chaplain informed us that their behaviour is very quiet and devout, and most of them bring spontaneously a small contribution to the offertory, which is collected by one or another of the male patients then present.

We have yet another visit to pay. Before leaving we are taken to the burial-ground. It is a forlorn, desolate-looking place enough, the absence

1

of tombstones giving it a naked, cold look. At the head of each grave, defined by a mound of earth, is placed a number referring to a book kept in the asylum, in which the name, age, and other particulars of the deceased is registered. The number of funerals is somewhere about one hundred and fifty per annum, the number of deaths being about two hundred and fifty, or 12.30 per cent. of the population, so that about a hundred bodies are removed for burial by friends. The per-centage of cures, by the way, has fluctuated in the twelve years from 6 to 11.60 per

cent.

The number of suicides has not been so large as might be expected, arguing a great amount of care and watchfulness on the part of the keepers. Of the melancholic patients, a large proportion are represented on admission as being prone to suicide; yet an actual suicide, or even attempt at it, is a rare event in the asylum. Two curious instances were related to us. One was an attempt, on the part of a male patient, by means of swallowing an iron tobacco-box, which was with much difficulty extracted from the pharynx. In the other case, the patient succeeded in destroying life by dividing the principal veins and arteries of the throat. The weapon made use of was a piece of steel hoop-a discarded "crinoline," in fact, sharpened to a keen edge, and fitted into two pieces of rough firewood, bound round with string by way of a handle. The coroner and jury of the inquest which was holden on the body highly complimented the officers of the establishment on the paucity of suicides.

As we stand in the cold and dismal cemetery moralising, whew! we are startled by a mad, unearthly scream echoing through the darkening shades-psha! it is only the train coming up from Barnet. We have barely time to take leave and express our thanks, to run round two sides of the asylum, across the line, and get our tickets, when the monster with his red glaring eyes comes thundering up, snorting and panting, in the light of the gas supplied to the station from the gas works of the asylum, for which the railway company pay some fifty pounds per annum.

In the carriage we fall into conversation with a gentleman who seems well acquainted with county lunatic asylums, and he assures us that of all of them, that for the county of Essex, at Brentwood, is the best conducted. We marvel, however, whether it can beat Colney Hatch. Hanwell, the other asylum for Middlesex, is next in point of accommodation. It usually contains about seventeen hundred patients, whilst Colney Hatch will conveniently hold two thousand one hundred. The former takes in the lunatic poor of the following unions: Brentford, Fulham, Hendon, Kingston, Staines, Strand, and Uxbridge; and of the parishes of Hampstead, Kensington, Paddington, Saint George's, Hanover-square, St. Giles and Bloomsbury, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, Marylebone, and Chelsea. Our asylum receives those from the unions of Barnet, East London, Edmonton, Hackney, Holborn, Poplar, Stepney, and Whitechapel; and the parishes of Saint George-in-the-East, Clerkenwell, Shoreditch, Bethnal-green, Islington, Saint Luke, Saint Pancras, and Mile-end Old Town. What is the size of Hanwell Asylum we have no means at hand of ascertaining, but we are informed that Colney Hatch covers a hundred and thirty-eight acres-thirty-one of which are laid out as ornamental grounds (with the exception of the space occupied by the gas works), thirty-five ploughed land, and thirty-nine in grass; the kitchen-garden and orchard take up ten more, and the cemetery a

little over an acre. The remainder is covered by the asylum buildings, chaplain's residence, and airing courts.

And here we close our inquiry, pronouncing an honest verdict that the arrangements of Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum are, in our opinion, in every way conducive to the health, comfort, and recovery of the patients. Would that their poor sane brothers in union-houses, or their rich fellowsufferers in private asylums, were treated half as well! Would that we could recal the past, and that the poor creatures who were for centuries subjected to chain and scourge-abandoned to nakedness, hunger, and cold-left to die of neglect, or killed outright by blows and stripes-had had a share of the enlightened treatment of which Colney Hatch affords a bright and shining example!

THE SWISS MOTHER.

BY J. E. CARPENTER.

SHE took his rifle from the wall,
The same his father bore;

She gave her boy his alpenstock,
His father's long before:

She did not let him see her weep,

But kissed his rosy face,

Then bade him boldly hasten forth

And take his father's place.

She thought but of her country's wrongs,
Yet pressed him to her heart,

Oh! well might that proud mother grieve
To see her boy depart.

A month before her husband joined
His brethren of the glen;

A week-his lifeless form they bore
In sorrow back again;

Those warrior-peasants laid it down
Within her Alpine cot,

Then hastened back to meet the foe,

For they might mourn him not.

But she must send another forth,
Her doubly stricken heart

Might well be proud and not to break
From her brave boy to part.

And so she took the rifle from

The chamber of the dead,

And filled the flask, and put it on,

Then forth her boy she led :

"Go," she said, proudly, "o'er the hills

You'll find your father's foe,

Yet not his death-blow to avenge,

For freedom strike the blow.'

It was her bleeding country's wrongs
That nerved that mother's heart,

Yet bitter were the tears she shed

To see her boy depart.

LEAR'S FIVEFOLD NEVER.

A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE.

BY FRANCIS Jacox.

Ir was literally that Lear's heart was breaking, when, with the last gaspings of worn-out nature,-suffocated, struggling ("Pray, you undo this button: Thank you, sir :")-he gave his last look on Cordelia's white dead face, as she lay cold, and still as any stone, in his shrunken, nerveless arms; and wailed forth, as he gazed, that wild, appalling iteration of Never, never, to which Shakspeare has, in perfect pity, and with profoundest pathos, assigned a line complete in itself-a verse in which the word is quintupled into intensified despair:

-No, no, no life:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, NEVER!*

Has any one ever observed, I wonder, or did Shakspeare himself consciously intend,—a painful analogy, but by contrast, between this Never of Lear's in the last scene of the last act, and another (quite other) Never of his, in the first of the first?-When, in his turbulent wrath at her lack of demonstrative affection, and her resolute abstinence from her sisters' hyperbole of adulation, Lear dismisses Cordelia to a foreign home, it is in these resentfully implacable words:

Thou hast her, France: let her be thine;
Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of hers again.†

for we

So raged the exasperated father in his pride of power. But he was to see that face of her's again. It was to be the first face he should see, and know, on recovering from delirium-when all else that were near of kin to him, had proved themselves less than kind, and, having stripped him of all, were banded together against him. That face of hers he

was to see again then-wistfully watching every change in his own; he was to recognise its kind, yearning devotion, little by little, as the madness abated, and his spirit came again as that of a little child: at first answering her tender "Sir, do you know me ?" with the dazed, dreamy response as of one that awakes in another world : "You are a spirit, I know; when did you die?"-anon, warming to her, battening his poor dim vision upon her, and essaying even to kneel to her-till she checks him with "No, sir, you must not kneel!" and he then prays she mock him not, he is a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward; and, to deal plainly, he fears he is not in his perfect mind. Surely he should know her, and should know that man, the physician, who stands beside her: yet is he doubtful: for he is mainly ignorant what place this is; and all the skill he has remembers not these garments; nor can he tell where he did lodge last night:—and then comes,

* King Lear, Act V. Sc. 3.

† Ibid., Act I. Sc. 1.

That sweet face of hers, therefore, he was to see again, and its sweetness was to be his solace for the short remainder of his pilgrimage. And yet not for all of even that short remainder. She was to die first. Cordelia was, by Goneril's and Edmund's devices, to be hanged in prison; and Lear was to totter on to his own death with dead Cordelia in his arms-and to vent the iterated Never, never, never, never, never, each stronger in feeling, each weaker in utterance than the last (that strain again, it had a dying fall): till his own stormful heart ceased beating, and there was a great calm.

That quintupled Never-crescendo in passionate emotion, diminuendo in physical force-one may call it an expansion to the power of five, and withal a quintessence-the very quintessential spirit of exhausted despair.

Compared with it, other and parallel passages in Shakspeare (parallel in kind, not in degree), may seem temperate and subdued. At some of them, however, a glance may be worth the while. Between Lear's Never, in respect of his Cordelia; and Edward of York's Never, in respect of his slaughtered sire; there is all the difference that holds between the two plays, King Lear and King Henry VI.

Sweet duke of York, our prop to lean upon;
Now thou art gone, we have no staff, no stay!

Now my soul's palace is become a prison:

For never henceforth shall I joy again,

Never, O never, shall I see more joy.†

The never again suggested by the eve of battle is illustrated in Hot spur's speech on the plain near Shrewsbury:

Sound all the lofty instruments of war,
And by that music let us all embrace:
For, heaven to earth, some of us never shall

A second time do such a courtesy.‡

The never of hopeless banishment is heard in Richard the Second's sentence on Norfolk:

The hopeless word of Never to return

Breathe I against thee upon pain of life.§

The never of, as it were, a Rachael mourning for her children, and that will not be comforted, because they are not, and to her will never upon earth be again, is heard in the piteous lament of Constance, in her maternal prevision of sorrow for Arthur-whom, if separated from her, she sees, in her mind's eye, coming to look as hollow as a ghost, as dim and meagre as an ague's fit;

* King Lear, Act IV. Sc. 7.

Third Part of King Henry VI. Act II. Sc. 1.
First Part of King Henry IV., Act V. Sc. 2.
King Richard II. Act I. Sc. 3.