Arrived at the gate we ring a bell; the porter opens it to us. We enter our name in the visitors’ book, and descend the gravel slope on which the asylum is placed. All round is a wide extent of land in which the lunatics take exercise and occasionally work. There are none outside now, for it is the hour appointed for Divine service. The door is opened for us by an attendant, who understands our mission. He takes us upstairs and we find ourselves seated in a little gallery set apart for the leading officers of the asylum. Just below us is the pulpit; on a line with it, but a little farther off, is the reading-desk; opposite us, at the other end of the room, is the organ. From the floor on which the pulpit is placed there is a gradually ascending series of benches; on our right are ranged the female, on our left the male inmates of the house. It may be that there are some four or five hundred present. Here and there amongst them you see their well-clad keepers. The lunatics attend this service willingly, it is a pleasure for them to come, it is a punishment for them to keep away. On the whole they behave very well, and, as is often the case outside the walls of lunatic asylums, the females greatly preponderate. From our gallery in this clean, cheerful chapel we look down upon the group below. The sight is an unmitigatedly sad one; we fail to see a single pleasant face. The chapel, considering who are the audience, is almost light and cheerful. It is painful to turn from its white walls and rafters to the crowd beneath and realize how much darker and more cheerless is the human face when it is void of intelligence. In this chapel you do not see the worse cases, they are properly concealed from the spectator’s eye; it is enough to know that they are equally wisely and carefully tended with those before you. The women are far more troublesome than the men. All are hideously ugly, such as Fuseli might dream of after a supper of pork-chops, such as, perhaps, that wonderful painter at Brussels, whose pictures form the chief modern attraction of the place, could have painted in that queer little imitation Roman ruin in which he lived and died, but such as no living artist, at any rate in England, could portray. You feel inclined to exclaim with Banquo— “What are these, So withered and so wild in their attire, That look not like the inhabitants of earth, And yet are on’t?”