And the mischievous Rosalind informs us that “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” All this is mere poetic banter; but there is a substratum of truth which the poets must have dimly felt. Modern alienists do not treat their patients to dark rooms and whips, as their predecessors did. They regard the maladies of their patients as brain diseases, which have been studied and classified, and are treated on general hygienic and therapeutic principles. A comparison of the classifications adopted in psychiatry with the symptoms of Love shows that Insanity and Love resemble each other especially in three common traits,—the presence of Illusions, a sort of Delirium of Persecution, and the Desire for Solitude. There are two ways in which madmen people the outside world with phantoms of their own imaginations—by means of illusions and of hallucinations. Hallucinations are pure figments of the imagination, without any object corresponding to them or suggesting them in the outer world. A patient suffering from them will stare into vacancy and see a friend, or perhaps the devil with horns, tail, and hoofs; and he sees him as vividly as if he were really there to be touched; the reason being that in that part of the brain where impressions of sight are localised a diseased action is set up which suggests a picture that is forthwith projected into outward space—as usual with all sense-impressions. In a word, the patient paints the devil in his mind’s eye, and there he is. Illusions, on the other hand, have real external objects for their cause; but the diseased imagination so falsifies the objects that there is little or no resemblance between the mental vision and the outside reality. A patient suffering from illusions sees a candle and thinks it is the sun, hears a footstep and thinks it thunder. Is not this precisely what Shakspere chides Cupid for—that he makes our eyes “behold and see not what they see?” or makes them “see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt?” Concerning Burns we have just read that “there was often a great disparity between his fair captivator and her attributes”—that is, the attributes with which she was invested by her lover. The lover, like the lunatic, has had moments when, “beholding his maiden, he half-knows she is not that which he worships”; but such intervals are rare. Take a madman who believes his body is made of glass, and throw him downstairs: none the less will he believe in his vitreous constitution. Show a lover the most beautiful woman in the world, still will he believe his own Dulcinea a hundred times more charming.