Nor is this an isolated case. One quite analogous to it is described by Raggi in his excellent study of the writings of the insane. Prof. Morselli has furnished me with another and still more interesting instance. “The patient A. T----” he writes, “was a joiner and cabinet-maker; he had a certain skill in wood-carving, and his furniture was much sought after.[325] About seven years ago he was attacked with mental disease, apparently melancholia, and tried to commit suicide by throwing himself from the roof of the town hall. He is now subject to attacks of excitement with systematized delusions. His predominant ideas are political--republican and anarchist--on a certain groundwork of ambition. He fancies himself changed into some great criminal; sometimes he is Gasperone, sometimes Il Passatore, at others Passanante. He is always drawing or carving, and his work generally takes the form of trophies or allegorical figures. “The most curious of all these is a piece of carving which represents a man dressed as a soldier, provided with wings, and standing on an inlaid pedestal covered with allegorical inscriptions. This figure has a trophy on its head, and other objects are carved on or around it, each of which expresses emblematically some one of T----’s delusions. For instance, the wings recall the fact that, when his first attack came on, he was in the square at Porto Recanati, selling his carvings, among which were several figures of angels, at a soldo a-piece. The ‘Medal of the order of the Pig’ is a token of contempt, wherewith he would like to decorate all the rich and powerful of the earth. The helmet, with a lantern hanging to the vizor (a reminiscence of Offenbach’s _Brigands_), symbolises the gendarmes who escorted him to the asylum. The cigar placed crosswise (note the position) represents his disdain for kings and tyrants; and the position of the leg recalls a fracture of that limb sustained by him in his attempt at suicide. “The inscriptions on the pedestal are scraps of verse or extracts from newspapers which T---- is always quoting, and to which he attaches some mysterious significance. They always, however, refer to the state of slavery to which he is reduced (_i.e._, his detention in the asylum), and the vengeance he will one day wreak on his captors.