It might be supposed that intellectual striving was not the medicine to offer to a diseased brain; but we are informed by Dr. Lindsay that in the vast majority of cases the best results flow from this method of treatment, and that a large percentage of cures is obtained. Such patients as would be injured by stimulating their faculties are debarred by the physician from their undue exercise, and others must be too far gone, or be too uninformed, to be capable of the pursuit. The surprise that lunatics should be susceptible of healthy mental exertion, arises from the common forgetfulness that many understandings are slightly affected, or are only deranged upon particular points. When Nat Lee was in Bedlam, he said that it was very difficult to write like a madman, and very easy to write like a fool. The works of the fools are more voluminous than the works of the madmen, because there are more fools than lunatics; but those who are completely mad are so far from experiencing a difficulty in writing in their own character, that they cannot write in any other. As many, however, who are not altogether right in their minds, are no more exclusively insane than people who are not absolutely wise are entirely foolish, it is easy to see that they may still be equal to much profitable mental exertion. In these days poor Christopher Smart would not be deprived of his pen and ink, and compelled to indent his long poem on "David" with a key on the panels of his cell; nor perhaps would the following epigram, which a woman in Bedlam wrote on Martin Madan's argument in favour of polygamy, be handed about as a phenomenon to be wondered at:-- "If John marry Mary, and Mary alone, It is a good match between Mary and John: But if John marry more wives, what blows and what scratches! 'Tis no longer a match, but a bundle of matches." In France, and we believe in some other continental countries, it is the habit to employ lunatic labour in the private farms surrounding the asylum. This plan was in the olden time pursued in England; but it appears to have gone out with the ancient system of coercion. When radical revolutions are accomplished, good ideas sometimes perish with the bad; and we cannot help thinking that the abandonment of this method of exercising lunatics was an error, and that a return to the old practice, under proper regulations, would be of advantage both to employer and employed. Never must we lose sight of the wisdom of freeing the patient as much as practicable from the companionship of his fellows, and of placing him, to the utmost of our power, in the same free condition which he enjoyed in his days of sanity.