It is therefore not the fear of death which can arrest the projects of the maniac mind; for on many occasions they seek it as the greatest consolation; and quietly submit to seclusion and its consequent privations sooner than renounce their opinions, or withhold their endeavours to accomplish that which appears to them, from the disordered state of their intellect, GOOD and RIGHT, and which by those of sane mind is denominated EVIL and WRONG. A very different opinion has however prevailed; and it has been conceived that the terror of example would deter lunatics from following the dictates of their distempered minds: and many worthy and pious persons who have been the stanch fautors of the dignity of our species, have maintained, that the Deity never so far abandons the being fashioned in his own likeness, and to whom he has imparted a ray of his intellectual light, as to deprive him of the power of discriminating between right and wrong. To such assumptions, unsupported by reason, and clashing with daily experience, the reader will not expect a serious reply—they must have originated in minds more confident of the perfection and endurance of the intellect, than grateful for its possession. It is not the object of these pages to shelter crime under the pretence of insanity; or to suppose that some degree of derangement must exist in the mind of the perpetrator:—on the contrary, it is believed, because every day furnishes instances, that men of the highest attainments and most lucid faculties will deliberately commit acts of turpitude,—foreseeing the consequences, and feeling the criminality of the act. But, it would be as much the subject of regret and against the law, that a human being, under a delusion which he firmly believed, and in the persuasion that he was acting from the immediate influence or instigation of the Divine command, should undergo the sentence of the law to the disgrace of his family:—as that science should ever attempt to contaminate the source of justice, by shielding criminality under the cover of disease.