The prodigious crops of hellebore with which this whole island abounded did not only furnish them with incomparable tea, snuff, and Hungary water, but impregnated the air of the country with such sober and salutiferous steams as very much comforted the heads and refreshed the senses of all that breathed in it.  A discarded statesman that, at his first landing, appeared stark, staring mad, would become calm in a week’s time, and upon his return home live easy and satisfied in his retirement.  A moping lover would grow a pleasant fellow by that time he had rid thrice about the island:  and a hair-brained rake, after a short stay in the country, go home again a composed, grave, worthy gentleman.

I have premised these particulars before I enter on the main design of this paper, because I would not be thought altogether notional in what I have to say, and pass only for a projector in morality.  I could quote Horace and Seneca and some other ancient writers of good repute upon the same occasion, and make out by their testimony that our streets are filled with distracted persons; that our shops and taverns, private and public houses, swarm with them; and that it is very hard to make up a tolerable assembly without a majority of them.  But what I have already said is, I hope, sufficient to justify the ensuing project, which I shall therefore give some account of without any further preface.

1.  It is humbly proposed, That a proper receptacle or habitation be forthwith erected for all such persons as, upon due trial and examination, shall appear to be out of their wits.

2.  That, to serve the present exigency, the college in Moorfields be very much extended at both ends; and that it be converted into a square, by adding three other sides to it.

3.  That nobody be admitted into these three additional sides but such whose frenzy can lay no claim to any apartment in that row of building which is already erected.

4.  That the architect, physician, apothecary, surgeon, keepers, nurses, and porters be all and each of them cracked, provided that their frenzy does not lie in the profession or employment to which they shall severally and respectively be assigned.

N.B. It is thought fit to give the foregoing notice, that none may present himself here for any post of honour or profit who is not duly qualified.

5.  That over all the gates of the additional buildings there be figures placed in the same manner as over the entrance of the edifice already erected, provided they represent such distractions only as are proper for those additional buildings; as of an envious man gnawing his own flesh; a gamester pulling himself by the ears and knocking his head against a marble pillar; a covetous man warming himself over a heap of gold; a coward flying from his own shadow, and the like.