man may be subject to various hallucinations,--may fancy himself to
be a teapot, or what not,--and yet be in such a condition of mind as
to call for no intervention either on behalf of his friends, or of
the law; while another may be in possession of intellectual faculties
capable of lucid exertion for the highest purposes, and yet be so mad
that bodily restraint upon him is indispensable. We know that the
sane man is responsible for what he does, and that the insane man
is irresponsible; but we do not know,--we only guess wildly, at the
state of mind of those, who now and again act like madmen, though no
court or council of experts has declared them to be mad. The bias of
the public mind is to press heavily on such men till the law attempts
to touch them, as though they were thoroughly responsible; and
then, when the law interferes, to screen them as though they were
altogether irresponsible. The same juryman who would find a man mad
who has murdered a young woman, would in private life express a
desire that the same young man should be hung, crucified, or skinned
alive, if he had moodily and without reason broken his faith to the
young woman in lieu of killing her. Now Trevelyan was, in truth, mad
on the subject of his wife's alleged infidelity. He had abandoned
everything that he valued in the world, and had made himself wretched
in every affair of life, because he could not submit to acknowledge
to himself the possibility of error on his own part. For that, in
truth, was the condition of his mind. He had never hitherto believed
that she had been false to her vow, and had sinned against him
irredeemably; but he had thought that in her regard for another man
she had slighted him; and, so thinking, he had subjected her to a
severity of rebuke which no high-spirited woman could have borne. His
wife had not tried to bear it,--in her indignation had not striven to
cure the evil. Then had come his resolution that she should submit,
or part from him; and, having so resolved, nothing could shake him.
Though every friend he possessed was now against him,--including
even Lady Milborough,--he was certain that he was right. Had not his
wife sworn to obey him, and was not her whole conduct one tissue of
disobedience? Would not the man who submitted to this find himself
driven to submit to things worse? Let her own her fault, let her
submit, and then she should come back to him.

He had not considered, when his resolutions to th