genuine useful education. Think of what desolated homes these poor creatures form a portion. Remember what a fearful cost it is to the respectable hard-working amongst us, who can barely manage to make two ends meet, to have to rear such palatial residences for our pauper lunatics. The asylum of which I write in its erection cost the county an enormous sum—in its maintenance it does ditto—and I hear it is now in an insecure state, firm as it looks, and that the county of Middlesex will have to spend upon it some tens of thousands of pounds more. I once visited this place in the winter-time; a large hall was lighted up, and there were some very pretty dissolving views exhibited, and there was dancing and music and eating and drinking going on. The room was covered with laurels and flowers and banners, and, of course, there were many ladies and gentlemen present, and the place had a cheerful air; and all confessed it was a good thing to give the poor creatures a little innocent amusement. But only think of dancing with lunatics—and such ugly ones too—and being held by the buttonhole by some wild-eyed ancient mariner. Coleridge might have come here and written: “He held him with his glistening eye, The wedding guest stood still, And listen’d like a child— The mariner has his will.” But if the wedding guest stays here long, he would not be in a fit state for the wedding—and still less would he be so if he goes over the building. What a contrast the present treatment of lunatics is to that which prevailed till lately! The exposure of the wretched system pursued at Bethlem, which took place in 1814, in consequence of the investigation of a parliamentary committee, appears to have been productive of great good. The visitors thus describe one of the women’s galleries:—“One of the side-rooms contained about ten patients, each chained by one arm or leg to the wall, the chain allowing them merely to stand up by the bench or form fixed to the wall, or sit down again. The nakedness of each patient was covered by a blanket gown only. The blanket gown is a blanket formed something like a dressing gown, with nothing to fasten it in parts. The feet even were naked.” Many women were locked up in cells, naked and chained, on straw, with only one blanket for a covering; and the windows being unglazed, the light in winter was shut out for the sake of warmth. In the men’s rooms, their nakedness and their mode of confinement, continues the report from which we have already quoted, gave this room the appearance of a dog-kennel. At this period the committee for months together made no inspection of the inmates. The house surgeon was in an insane state himself, and still oftener drunk; and the keepers were often in the latter state; yet at this very time the governors spent £600 in opposing a bill for regulating mad-houses, and I dare say they cried out lustily, No centralization!—no interference with vested