A Bourbon prince thought himself dead, and refused to eat until his friends invited him to dine with Turenne and other French heroes long since departed. There was a tradesman who thought he was a seven-shilling piece, and advertised himself thus: “If my wife presents me for payment, don’t change me.” Accuse me not of transatlantic plagiarism. Bishop Warburton tells us of a man who thought himself a _goose pie_; and Dr. Ferriday, of Manchester, had a patient who thought he had _swallowed the devil_. So indeed thought Luther. As in Hudibras, “Did not the devil appear to Martin Luther in Germany for certain?” In Paris there lived a man who thought he had with others been guillotined, and when Napoleon was emperor, their heads were all restored, but in _the scramble he got the wrong one_. And there is the “Visitor of Phantaste” in the old play of “Lingua,” who exclaims: “No marvel, for when I beheld my fingers, I saw they were as transparent as glass.” You perceive that the illusions of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” are not all fictions: the maids who fancied they were turned into bottles, were not more in error than these philosophers with their _maladie imaginaire_. CAST. Is there not wisdom, Evelyn, in nursing _some_ of these innocent illusions? I remember Kotzebue, in his “Journey to Paris,” relates the following anecdote of a young girl, romantically in love. Her lover had often accompanied her on the harp: he died, and his harp had remained in her room. After the first excess of her despair, she sunk into the deepest melancholy, and much time elapsed ere she would sit down to her instrument. At last she did so, gave some touches, and, hark! the harp, _tuned alike_, resounded in echo. The good girl was at first seized with a secret shuddering, but soon felt a kind of soft melancholy: she was firmly persuaded that the spirit of her lover was softly sweeping the strings of the instrument. The harpsichord, from this moment, constituted her only pleasure, as it afforded her the certainty that her lover was still hovering near her. One of those unfeeling men, who want to know and clear up every thing, once entered her apartment. The girl instantly begged him to be quiet, for at that very moment the dear harp spoke most distinctly. Being _informed of the amiable illusion_ which overcame her reason, he laughed, and, with a great display of learning, proved to her by experimental physics, that all this was _very natural_. From that instant the maiden grew melancholy, drooped, and soon after died. EV. Truth is not always to be spoken, nor too much energy exerted, in our treatment; for many a _mad act_, as it will be called, is resorted to, _as a relief_. Tirouane de Mericourt was wont to _saturate her bedclothes with cold water, then lie down on it_. Although an extreme _remedy_, it might yield her relief from _burning_ pains. In the darker ages, she would have been chained and scourged.