Lamb’s strong feeling against allowing his sister to be placed in an hospital for lunatics is more than justified by the accounts given, in the _Life of Lord Shaftesbury_, of the frightfully barbarous treatment to which insane people were subjected in the early part of the present century. Their keepers always visited them whip in hand. They were sometimes spun round on rotatory chairs at a tremendous speed; sometimes they were chained in wells, in which the water was made to rise till it reached their chins; sometimes they were left quite alone, chained to their beds, from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, unable to rise, and with nothing but bread and water within their reach. No wonder that Charles Lamb said he would burn by slow fires rather than let his sister be treated like this. The strong restorative of work done and duty fulfilled enabled Charles, within little more than a year of the dreadful calamity which had darkened his life, to make his first appearance as an author. These first poems were dedicated to “the author’s best friend and sister.” He wished to fence her round, as it were, by assurances of the high value he set on her, and of the depth of his love. “I wish,” he wrote to Coleridge, “to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor Mary.” When she was restored to his daily companionship, there was nothing in her outward manner or appearance to indicate what a terrible cloud rested on her past life. Her manners were tranquil and composed. De Quincey speaks of her as that “Madonna-like lady.” There was no appearance of settled melancholy in consequence of the fatal deed she had been led to commit, but that it left a wound which was hidden rather than healed is indicated by the words written long years after the event: “My dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart.” On another occasion, a child Mary loved asked her why she never spoke of her mother. A cry of pain was the only response. Her dependence on her brother was an ever-visible presence in both their lives. Mrs. Cowden Clarke relates: “He once said, with his peculiar mode of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, ‘You must die first, Mary.’ She nodded, with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, ‘Yes, I must die first, Charles.’” The event was contrary to the wish and expectation thus expressed. Charles preceded Mary to the grave by thirteen years; but during the greater part of that time her intellect was so clouded as to deprive her of the power of the acute suffering the loss of her brother would otherwise have caused.