Nor would it be wise to suppose that none were benefited by the treatment. The eagerness with which the vulgar crowd to a sight, and the intense excitement with which London mobs witness a royal procession to the houses of Parliament, or a Lord Mayor's pageant on its way from the City to Westminster, may afford us some idea of the inspiriting sensations experienced by a troop of wretches taken from their kennels to Whitehall, and brought into personal contact with their sovereign--their ideal of grandeur! Such a trip was a stimulus to the nervous system, compared with which the shock of a galvanic battery would have been but the tickling of a feather. And, over and above this, was the influence of imagination, which in many ways may become an agent for restoring the tone of the nervous system, and so enabling Nature to overcome the obstacles of her healthy action. Montaigne admirably treated this subject in his essay, "Of the Force of Imagination"; and his anecdote of the happy results derived by an unfortunate nobleman from the use of a flat gold plate, graven with celestial figures, must have occurred to many of his readers who have witnessed the beneficial effects which are frequently produced by the practices of quackery. "These apes' tricks," says Montaigne, "are the main cause of the effect, our fancy being so far seduced as to believe that such strange and uncouth formalities must of necessity proceed from some abstruse science. Their very inanity gives them reverence and weight." And old Burton, touching, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," on the power of imagination, says, quaintly:-- "How can otherwise blear eyes in one man cause the like affection in another? Why doth one man's yawning make another man yawn? Why do witches and old women fascinate and bewitch children; but, as Wierus, Paracelsus, Cardan, Migaldus, Valleriola, Cæsar Vanninus, Campanella, and many philosophers think, the forcible imagination of one party moves and alters the spirits of the other. Nay more, they cause and cure, not only diseases, maladies, and several infirmities by this means, as 'Avicenna de Anim. 1. 4, sect. 4,' supposeth in parties remote, but move bodies from their places, cause thunder, lightning, tempests; which opinion Alkindus, Paracelsus, and some others approve of." In this passage Burton touches not only on the effects of the imagination, but also on the impression which the nervous energy of one person may create upon the nervous sensibility of another. That such an impression can be produced, no one can question who observes the conduct of men in their ordinary relations to each other. By whatever term we christen it--endeavouring to define either the cause or its effect--we all concur in admitting that decision of character, earnestness of manner, enthusiasm, a commanding aspect, a piercing eye, or a strong will, exercise a manifest control over common natures, whether they be acting separately or in masses.