peace and quiet of this kingdom thereby.”  Thus far one of its votaries:  and all that he vaunts to have acquired by this mysterious faculty of enthusiasm is the having rendered it “at length perfectly subduable.”  Yet those who have written on “Mystical devotion,” have declared that, “it is a sublime state of mind to which whole sects have aspired, and some individuals appear to have attained."[A] The histories of great visionaries, were they correctly detailed, would probably prove how their delusions consisted of the ocular spectra of their brain and the accelerated sensations of their nerves.  BAYLE has conjured up an amusing theory of apparitions, to show that HOBBES, who was subject to occasional terrors, might fear that a certain combination of atoms agitating his brain might so disorder his mind as to expose him to spectral visions; and so being very timid, and distrusting his own imagination, he was averse at times to be left alone.  Apparitions often happen in dreams, but they may happen to a man when awake, for reading and hearing of them would revive their images, and these images might play even an incredulous philosopher some unlucky trick.

[Footnote A:  CHARLES BUTLER has drawn up a sensible essay on “Mystical Devotion.”  He was a Roman Catholic.  NORRIS, and Dr. HENRY MORE, and Bishop BERKELEY, may be consulted by the curious.]

But men of genius whose enthusiasm has not been past recovery, have experienced this extraordinary state of the mind, in those exhaustions of study to which they unquestionably are subject.  Tissot, on “The Health of Men of Letters,” has produced a terrifying number of cases.  They see and hear what none but themselves do.  Genius thrown into this peculiar state has produced some noble effusions.  KOTZEBUE was once absorbed in hypochondriacal melancholy, and appears to have meditated on self-destruction; but it happened that he preserved his habit of dramatic composition, and produced one of his most energetic dramas—­that of “Misanthropy and Repentance.”  He tells us that he had never experienced such a rapid flow of thoughts and images, and he believed, what a physiological history would perhaps show, that there are some maladies, those of the brain and the nerves, which actually stretch the powers of the mind beyond their usual reach.  It is the more vivid world of ideal existence.

But what is more evident, men of the finest genius have experienced these hallucinations in society acting on their moral habits.  They have insulated the mind.  With them ideas have become realities, and suspicions certainties; while events have been noted down as seen and heard, which in truth had never occurred.  ROUSSEAU’S phantoms scarcely ever quitted him for a day.  BARRY imagined that he was invisibly persecuted by the Royal Academy, who had even spirited up a gang of housebreakers.  The vivid memoirs of ALFIERI will authenticate what DONNE, who himself had suffered from them, calls “these eclipses,