to guide, to counsel, to cheer him, and to
protect him on the verge of the mysterious calamity, from the depths of
which she rose so often unruffled to his side. To a friend in any
difficulty she was the most comfortable of advisers, the wisest of
consolers." Hazlitt said that "he never met with a woman who could
reason, and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable,--Mary Lamb."
The writings of Elia are strewn, as we know, with the tenderest tributes
to her worth. "I wish," he says, "that I could throw into a heap the
remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal
division."

The psychology of madness is a most subtle inquiry. How slight the
mysterious touch that throws the smooth-running human mechanism into a
chaos of jarring elements, that transforms, in the turn of an eyelash,
the mild humanity of the gentlest of beings into the unreasoning
ferocity of the tiger.

The London "Times" of September 26, 1796, contained the following
paragraph:--

"On Friday afternoon the coroner and a jury sat on the
body of a lady in the neighborhood of Holborn, who died in
consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.
It appeared by the evidence adduced that while the family
were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife
lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little
girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her
infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and
with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her
cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too
late. [7] The dreadful scene presented him the mother lifeless,
pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing
over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father,
weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from
the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks
she had been madly hurling about the room.

"For a few days prior to this, the family had observed
some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased
on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next
morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn; but that gentleman was not at
home.

"The jury of course brought in their verdict,--_Lunacy_."

I need not supply the omitted names of the actors in this harrowing
scene. Mary Lamb was at once placed in the Asylum at Hoxton, and the
victim of her frenzy was laid t