"The Bedlam has a long staff, and a cow or ox-horn by his side; his clothing fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed all over with rubins (ribands), feathers, cuttings of cloth, and what not, to make him seem a madman, or one distracted, when he is no other than a wandering and dissembling knave." This writer here points out one of the grievances resulting from licensing even harmless lunatics to roam about the country; for a set of pretended madmen, called "Abram men," a cant term for certain sturdy rogues, concealed themselves in their _costume_, covered the country, and pleaded the privileged denomination when detected in their depredations.[178] Sir Walter Scott first obligingly suggested to me that these roving lunatics were out-door pensioners of Bedlam, sent about to live as well as they could with the pittance granted by the hospital. The fullest account that I have obtained of these singular persons is drawn from a manuscript note transcribed from some of Aubrey's papers, which I have not seen printed. "Till the breaking out of the civil wars, _Tom o' Bedlams_ did travel about the country; they had been poor distracted men, that had been put into Bedlam, where recovering some soberness, they were licentiated to go a begging; _i.e._, they had on their left arm an armilla, an iron ring for the arm, about four inches long, as printed in some works.[179] They could not get it off; they wore about their necks a great horn of an ox in a string or bawdry, which, when they came to a house, they did wind, and they put the drink given to them into this horn, whereto they put a stopple. Since the wars I do not remember to have seen any one of them." The civil wars, probably, cleared the country of all sorts of vagabonds; but among the royalists or the parliamentarians, we did not know that in their rank and file they had so many Tom o' Bedlams. I have now to explain something in the character of Edgar in _Lear_, on which the commentators seem to have ingeniously blundered, from an imperfect knowledge of the character which Edgar personates.