more fertile and prolific in its effects, than the body.

The common misconceptions of perfons labouring under this disease, such as their being kings, lords, cocks, bears, apes, owls, and objects of a more fantastical kind, are justly attributed by Wierus* to this fource. One day, while Alexander had ftripped himself to play at ball, the perfons who were playing with him obferved a man fitting in profound and melancholy filence on his throne, dressed in the royal robes, with the diadem upon his head, and the fceptre in his hand; and when they demanded who he was, he seemed to disdain giving them an answer; but being further questioned, he at length wakened as it were from his reverie, and replied, "My name is Dionyfius; I am a native "of Messene: upon a criminal process against "me, I left that place, and embarked for Baby"lon, where I was kept a long time in chains;

but this day the god Serapis appeared to "me, broke my chains, conducted me hither, "and ordered me to reaffume in dignified filence "my royalty and crown." And many other inftances of the like fort might be given.

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Occult Philos, lib. v. cap. 64.

The

The force of imagination indeed is fo great, that, as Ludovicus Vives relates, a Jew in France, who had come by chance fafely over a terribly dangerous paffage, by means of a very narrow plank that lay over a precipice, on perceiving the next day the danger he had escaped, fell down, and instantly expired. It is by working on the imagination of patients, that empirics oftentimes perform fuch extraordinary cures; as in those common inftances of the cure of the toothach, ague, gout, and hydrophobia, by means of pretended fpells, words, tractors, characters, and charms. Strong conceit is a kind of mental rudder which REASON fhould hold for the purpose of steering the mind into its right course; but reason too frequently fuffers itself to be carried away by the ftrong gales of a corrupt and vitiated fancy, and by the violence of those perturbations which unreftrained paffions create. Philofophy and religion are certainly the best antidotes to thefe intellectual difturbances, and, by their operation, if timely administered, all the exorbitant defires of the mind, and every unruly and extravagant paffion of the heart, might be moderated and reftrained within their proper bounds; but men, alas! instead of applying these falutary medicines to abate the rage, and recover the temper, of their vitiated imaginations, cherish the disease in their bofoms until

their increafing appetites, like the hounds of Acteon, tear into pieces the foul they were intended to enliven and protect.

The paffions and perturbations which affect the fancy, and distract the imagination, are divided by the Thomifts into the fix which covet, and the five which invade; by Ariftotle, into those which give pleasure or pain; by Plato, into those which engender love or hatred; by Ludovicus Vives, into good and bad; by St. Barnard, into those which excite hope or fear; to which others add, thofe which create joy or forrow: but Wright, the Jefuit, diftributes them into those which arife from the irafcible and concupifcible inclinations.

SORROW may be included in the catalogue of irafcible paffions productive of melancholy; for it is not only the infeparable companion, but both the cause and effect of this disease. Sorrow and melancholy move as it were in a circle, and reciprocally act upon and produce each other. This affection is defcribed by St. Chryfoftom, in his feventeenth Epiftle to Olympia, to be "a "cruel torture of the foul; a poisonous worm, "which continually gnaws upon the heart, "and confumes both the body and the mind; a "perpetual executioner, working in night and "darkness;

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extraordinary inftance of a patient whofe mind was weighed down by the blackest melancholy merely from his having indulged immoderate forrow *. And Montanus furnishes another instance of the like kind, in the cafe of a noble matron, whose forrow gained fuch firm poffeffion of her mind that the confequent melancholy could never be removed. It was the violence of forrow that transformed Hecuba into a dog, and Niobe into stone.

Widow'd and childless, lamentable state!
A doleful sight among the dead she sat;
Harden'd with woes, a statue of despair;
To every breath of wind unmov'd her hair;
Her cheeks still reddening, but their colour dead;
Faded her eye, and set within her head.

No more her pliant tongue its motion keeps,
But lies congeal'd within her frozen lips.
Stagnate and dull within her purple veins,
Its current stopp'd, the lifeless blood remains.
Her feet their usual offices refuse;

Her arms and neck their graceful gestures lose;
Action and life from every part are gone,
And ev'n her entrails turn'd to solid stone:

Yet still she weeps, and, whirl'd by stormy winds,
Borne through the air, her native country finds;
There fix'd she stands upon a bleaky hill;
There yet her marble cheeks fresh tears distill.

* Mærore maceror, marcesco & consenesco miser, offa atque pellis fum mifera macritudine.