It comes then, to this--to revert to the question, what was the medical knowledge or practice at the time of Coke and Hale, to which they would turn for direction when insanity came before them in the Courts of Law?--that when the lawyers went to the doctors for light they got surprisingly little help. They had better have confined themselves to reading the old Greek and Roman books on medicine, of which the medical practice of that period was but a servile imitation, and not have added, from their belief in witchcraft, the horrible punishment of lunatics, which in our country extended over the period between 1541 and 1736, when the laws against witchcraft were abolished. The last judicial murder of a witch in the British Isles (Sutherlandshire) was in 1722. Leaving now the insane who were punished as witches, I pass on to remark that in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," it is stated that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours. "Whether," the writer proceeds, "there be any truth in the insinuation that we are more liable to this calamity than other nations,[51] or that our native gloominess hath peculiarly recommended subjects of this class to our writers, we certainly do not find the same in the printed collections of French and Italian songs." Half a dozen so-called mad songs are selected. These refer to much the same period as that we have been considering; and, in fact, we come upon the "Old Tom of Bedlam," or Cranke or Abram man, who "would swear he had been in Bedlam, and would talk frantickly of purpose," so notorious in connection with the beggary which endeavoured to make capital out of the asylum most familiar to our ancestors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this light the Bedlam beggars appear in "King Lear"-- "The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Stick in their numb'd and mortify'd bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;" and these enforce their charity by lunatic "bans," that is, by licences to beg under the badge of the Star of Bethlehem. Some doggerel from the most ancient of the Percy "Reliques" will serve for a sample of the rest: "Forth from my sad and darksome cell, Or from the deepe abysse of Hell, Mad Tom is come into the world againe, To see if he can cure his distemper'd braine." Tom appears to have brought away with him some of his fetters, then sufficiently abundant in Bedlam: "Come, Vulcan, with tools and with tackles, To knocke off my troublesome shackles." _This_ method of treatment--by fetters--has not, it may be well to state, survived, like immersion, in the practice of the present Master of Bedlam.