same patient shall not be given within two years from the date of the expiration.'

It is worth while to give the actual words of their comment, because the Commissioners know better than any other persons the amount of possible danger that may be connected with the arrangement. This is the more important, since the question of public safety may be made a convenient and plausible means of restricting the operation of the measure by those to whose interest it seems opposed. The Commissioners say :

'We think that clause 7 might be modified by permitting more than one patient to be received with our consent; that clause 8 might be varied by the substitution of six months for two years; and that permission might also be given for the reception of voluntary boarders into single care, just as they are at present received, upon their own application, into hospitals and licensed houses. This would enable persons who are capable of exercising volition and are desirous of subjecting themselves to treatment, being suitable for residence under such conditions, to avail themselves, without difficulty or more than nominal formalities, of medical or other care in its simpler and less restrictive form, and in private houses as well as in institutions.

'We have, however, no doubt that, both in the course which was embodied in the Bill, and in that which we have above indicated, there should be immediate notification to us, with power to visit whenever it should appear to us to be desirable, and to vary or determine the residence under the conditions of these new enactments, whenever we considered it necessary.'

A suggestion was made by Sir William Church, in a letter to the Times,' that such cases might be notified to the Medical Officer of Health, who should report to the Commissioners if all was not right; and a similar suggestion was made by the late Dr Mortimer Granville in his evidence before the 1877 committee. It would probably be practicable and effective, and may be necessary, unless the Commissioners are adequately increased in number. It would be well, indeed, if such a provision were made applicable to all cases of disease of any kind received for payment; and the homes in which they are received should always be inspected by the Medical Officer of Health. But for this, wise as it would be, we must wait,

It has indeed been said that any such provision for the relief of early, threatened, or feared insanity is rendered needless by the present law, which allows such sufferers to go into asylums as voluntary patients. Those who hold this opinion know little of such cases. To suggest to a patient, whose great terror, generally speaking, is lest he should become or be thought to be insane, that he should become an inmate of a lunatic asylum, is a procedure that has only to be stated to be condemned. Nor could it survive a recital of the experience of some of those who have adopted this course. We have seen an account of the experience of one who went as a voluntary patient to a 'hospital' of high repute, a large semi-public institution. The constant companionship of the insane, the shrieks and sounds from far and near, were so unendurable that he obtained leave to try to secure quiet in the carpenter's workshop, where he found the occupation to be that of making coffins for the inmates. The constant locking and unlocking of every door involved unceasing suggestions, while his insomnia was not lessened by the light of a lantern being thrown on his face each hour through the night. After three weeks he felt that, if he remained, he should become definitely insane. He left, and under private care speedily recovered.

The arrangements for the care of the insane need improvement in other ways, of which there is little present prospect. Every medical superintendent of an asylum is also its general manager; and this work, involving a vast amount of writing, keeping accounts, and the like, largely diminishes the time that he is able to give to the patients. There is much truth in the statement made by Mr Brudenell Carter in a recent book:-*

'The medical superintendent has to be the head of a great establishment, embracing gardens and a farm, as well as the staff and buildings of the asylum itself. The managing committee value him for the sake of the qualities they can appreciate. He must, primarily, be a firm and strict but just master, an administrator and organiser, and only secondarily a skilled physician. . . . Men enter asylum medical service at the outset of their career, and grow up under its conditions.

'Doctors and their Work,' by R, Brudenell Carter, F.R,C,S. Smith,

Elder & Co., 1903,

Each enters the groove early in life; and, to ensure promotion, the groove must have been of such a character as strongly to divert his attention from medicine and direct it towards administration.'

It would be well if the two branches of work were separated, so that the most experienced medical officer could give his undivided attention to his patients.

In truth, through the whole system runs the dominant idea that the insane need only care, and should be left to get well if they can. An entire separation of their medical supervision from general medicine is the inevitable result. Yet medical science shows more and more the interdependence of morbid states, and the unwisdom of all narrow exclusiveness. A few asylum medical officers are indeed doing good work at the pathology of insanity; and the London County Council, some years ago, wisely appointed to their asylum at Claybury a skilled pathologist, whose researches have been of great value to pathological science. The same Council, in 1889, considered a plan for a definite bridge between general medicine and the care of the insane. A committee, presided over by Mr Brudenell Carter, took much evidence, which is printed in their report, and recommended to the County Council that a small hospital for the insane should be built near London, with a staff of two resident medical officers having asylum experience, and four physicians, each of whom should be physician to a general hospital. But the Council rejected the proposal. Whatever the result, it would certainly have been an interesting experiment.

Many of the facts we have surveyed tend to bring us back to the place from which we started. The insane are, one and all, the subjects of disease, of disorder of the higher functions of the brain, induced by various morbid influences and morbid tendencies. That is a proposition from which few would now venture to dissent. The sufferers, as we have seen, are in the ultimate custody of the Lord Chancellor as the representative of the King. Is it not time that this fact were fairly faced? Reverently as the seventh Edward may regard the action of the first, times have changed as centuries have passed; and that which was inaugurated as a source of regal income

has no longer such motive. The arrangement is of no advantage to the Crown, but has many disadvantages to its subjects. The Lord Chancellor, as the King's representative, is subject to the control of Parliament only when a change in legal arrangements is proposed, or when an alteration in the payment to his subordinates involves an increased demand on the Treasury. Public opinion he can ignore with impunity; and he can disregard as he likes even the representations of his subordinates. The insane constitute only one of a multitude of matters to which he must attend, and they can receive only a rare fraction of attention.

Some day, near or remote, we doubt not it will be deemed wise to break this chain, forged long ago by the Plantagenets, and to free the insane from the legal dominance which has already become, in the main, a hindrance rather than a help. When that day comes, it may be that all the work of the departments which deal with public health, and with this form of disease, will be united under a responsible minister. The management of inebriates, now under the Home Office, the general hygiene of the country, with the investigation and arrest of epidemics, and the supervising control of the Medical Officers of Health, now under the Local Government Board, might well be joined to the supervision of the insane. All these have closer mutual relations than any one of them has with the department with which it is now connected. Combined, they would furnish an adequate basis for a separate department and a special minister. Many improvements in asylum work would then be possible, at which we have been unable to glance. The time for such a rearrangement is not yet, but may be less distant than it appears.

Art. V. THE COLLECTED WORKS OF LORD BYRON.

1. The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals. Edited by Rowland E. Prothero. Six vols. London Murray, 1898-1901.

2. The Works of Lord Byron: the Poetical Works. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Seven vols. London: Murray, 1898-1904.

THE completion of what may be regarded as a final edition of Byron's writings both in poetry and prose is surely a notable event in literary history. Nothing indeed is likely to modify very materially either the estimate which has been formed of his character since the appearance of Moore's work, or the verdict which his countrymen have long since passed on him as a poet. But we are now in a position to understand much in the man himself, and more in his work as an artist, which it was not possible to understand fully and clearly before; we are enabled to review both, if not in any absolutely new light, at least in the light of testimony and illustration so ample, nay, so exhaustive, that probably nothing of any importance will ever be added to it. In these thirteen volumes we have a contribution to biography and criticism to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in modern times. There is no corner, no recess, in Byron's crowded life, from boyhood to manhood, from manhood to the end, into which we are not admitted; we know him as we know Pepys and as we know Johnson.

To say nothing of a correspondence in which his experiences and his impressions, his idiosyncrasies and his temper, are reflected as in a mirror, records intended for no eyes but his own reveal to us his most secret thoughts. He is exhibited in all his moods and in all his extremes. We can watch every phase which, in its rapid and capricious alternations of darkness and light, his extraordinarily complex and mobile character assumed. The infirmities, the follies, the vices which revolted Wordsworth and Browning and degraded him at times to the level of fribbles like Nash and Brummell and of mere libertines like Queensberry and Hertford; the sudden transitions by which, in the resilience of his nobler