kindly face; but it is but the weakly shadow of a physical man.  But it was only physically that George Wilson was a poor type of humanity.  What noble health and excellence there were in that noble mind and heart!  So amiable, so patient, so unaffectedly pious, so able and industrious; a beautiful example of a great, good, memorable and truly loveable man.  Let us thank God for George Wilson:  for his life and his example.  Hundreds of poor souls ready to sink into morbid despair of ever doing anything good, will get fresh hope and heart from his story.  It is well, indeed, that there have been some in whom the physical system equals the moral; men like Christopher North and Sydney Smith,—­men in whom the play of the lungs was as good as the play of the imagination, and whose literal heart was as excellent as their metaphysical.  We have all seen examples in which the noblest intellect and kindest disposition were happily blended with the stoutest limbs and the pleasantest face.  And the sound mind in the sound body is doubtless the perfection of the human being.  I have walked many miles and many hours over the heather, with one of the ablest men in Britain:  a man whom at fourscore his country can heartily trust with perhaps the gravest charge which any British subject can undertake.  And I have witnessed with great delight the combination of the keenest head and best heart, with physical strength and activity which quite knock up men younger by forty years.

When I was reading Dr. Forbes Winslow’s book, already named, a very painful idea was impressed upon me.  Dr. Winslow gives us to understand that madness is for the most part a condition of most awful suffering.  I used to think that though there might be dreadful misery on the way to madness, yet once reason was fairly overthrown, the suffering was over.  This appears not to be so.  All the miserable depression of spirits, all the incapacity to banish distressing fears and suspicions, which paved the way to real insanity, exist in even intensified degree when insanity has actually been reached.  The poor maniac fancies he is surrounded by burning fires, that he is encircled by writhing snakes, that he is in hell, tormented by devils; and we must remember that the misery caused by firmly believing a thing which does not exist, is precisely the same as that which would be occasioned to a sane person if the things imagined were facts.  It seems, too, that many insane people are quite aware that they are insane, which of course aggravates what they have to endure.  It must be a dreadful thing when the mind passes the point up to which it is still useful and serviceable, though unsound, and enters upon the stage of recognized insanity.  It must be dreadful to feel that you are not quite yourself; that something is wrong; that you cannot discard suspicions and fears which still you are aware are foolish and groundless.  This is a melancholy stage, and if it last long a very perilous one.  Great anxiety,