Sir HENRY HALFORD is an elegant writer both in English

and Latin. His orations are Ciceronian : he reminds us strongly of college. Some of his addresses open like a Pro Cali° or In Clo- diwn. We fancy we are listening to the ore rotunda of Public Orator TATHAM,—now, we suppose, Public Orator no more. The sentences are Rolliads. They flow and flow, till we listen and grow drowsy, as under the influence of a bubbling brook or musi- cal cascade. But what has all this scholarship to do with the bed-side ? A scholar must feel satisfied that his prescriptions are at least made up in the most elegant Latin, whether the medicine cure him or not. It was for his Latinity, no doubt, that the late King wished to make Sir HENRY a-Peer : he is fit, in- deed, for a Roman Senator.

The English Essays have nothing remarkable in them, beyond an extreme polish of phrase. They are not deficient in good sense ; and they indicate a description of conduct and practice likely to be agreeable in high quarters. One of the Essays is a practical illustration of a passage in SRAKSPEARE. Sir HENRY proves Hamlet's test of madness to be correct.

"Ecstacy Sly pulse as yours cloth temperately keep time, And makes as healthful music. It is not madness That I have utter'd : bring me to the test, And I the matter will reword,which madness

Would ganzbolfrom ! HAMLET, Act iii. Scene 4.

The illustration runs as follows.

"The following case, which occurred to me in practice, in the month of January, 1829, may serve to prove the correctness of Shakspeare's test of madness, as above given.

"A gentleman of considerable fortune in Oxfordshire, about thirty- five years of age, sent for his solicitor to make his will. He was in habits of strict friendship with him, and stated that he wished to add five hun- dred pounds a year to his mother's jointure, if she got well, she being then (to the knowledge of the solicitor and himself only) confined as a lunatic ; to make a provision for two natural children ; to leave a few trifling legacies ; and then, if he died childless, to make him, the solicitor, his heir. His friend expressed his gratitude, but added that he could not accept such a mark of his good opinion, until he was convinced that it Was his deliberate judgment so to dispose of his property, and that deci- sion communicated to him six months afterwards.

"In about six weeks time the gentleman became deranged, and con- tinued in such a state of excitement for a whole month, (during which he was visited constantly by Sir George Tuthill and myself), as to require coercion every day. At the expiration of that time he was composed and comfortable. But his languor and weakness bore a proportion to his late excitement, and it was very doubtful whether he would live. On enter- ing his room one day, to my question how he found himself, he answered —` Very ill, Sir ; about to die ; and only anxious to make my will first." This could hardly be listened to under his circumstances, and he was per- suaded to forego that wish for the present. The next day he made the same answer to the same question, but in such a tone and manner, as to extort from common humanity, even at the probable expense of future litigation, an acquiescence in his wish to disburden his mind. The soli- citor was sent for, and, having been with him the preceding evening, met vs, at our consultation in the morning, with a will prepared according to the instructions he had received Wore the attack of disease, as well as to those given the last night. He proposed to read this to the gentleman in our presence, and that we should witness the signature of it, if we were satisfied that it expressed clearly his intentions. It was read, and he answered, yes,'—' yes,' distinctly to every item, as it was delibe- rately proposed to him. On going down stairs with Sir George Tuthill and the solicitor, to consider what was to be done, I expressed some re- gret that we, the physicians, had been involved in an affair which could hardly be expected to terminate without an inquiry in a court of law, in which we must necessarily be called upon to justify ourselves for permit- ting this good gentleman, under such questionable circumstances, to make a will. It occurred to me then, to propose to my colleague to go up again into the sick room, to see whether our patient could re-word the matter, as a test, on Shakspeare's authority, of his soundness of mind. He repeated the clauses which contained the addition to his mother's jointure, and which made provision for the natural children, with suffi- cient correctness ; but he stated that he had left a namesake, though not a relation, ten thousand pounds, whereas he had left him five thousand pounds only; and there he paused. After which, I thought it proper to

ask him, to whom he had left his real property, when these legacies should have been discharged,—in whom did he intend that his estate should be vested after his death, if he died without children ? In the heir-at-law, to be sure," was the reply. Who is your heir-at-law? "1 do not know."

Thus he gambolled' from the matter, and laboured, according to this test, under his madness still.

" He died, intestate, of course, four days afterwards ; and I owe it to the solicitor, the friend, to testify that his conduct throughout was strictly honourable. And I have a pleasure in adding, that the heir-at-law haa generously made good the bequest to the mother, and the provision for the natural children, to the extent of more than thirty thousand pounds. "It is always a subject for regret, when a physician becomes a party to the doubts and difficulties of a civil action ; and a prudent man will, if possible, avoid committing himself upon questions, the natural uncer- tainty of which is likely to be further perplexed by legal ingenuity and contending interests. Still there are cases of this kind in which the me- dical practitioner cannot, without a dereliction of duty, refuse to deliver his opinion, and in which the parties concerned have a right to the bene- fit of his judgment and experience with respect to the question of the patient's sanity of mind, as well as to that of his bodily health. In cases of such a nature there may be some value in a test like that proposed by the poet ; by him, of whom it has been justly observed by Dr. Johnson, that he is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of man- ners and of life.'

"Human nature, in fact, has been and is always the same; and the de: scriptions of it, which we meet with in the ancient poets, are at this day as true as when they were originally drawn. It has twice occurred to me to find the portraits which Horace has given of madness exemplified to the life.

"One case, that of the gentleman of Argos, whose delusion led him to suppose that he was attending the representation of a play, as he sat in his bedchamber, is so exact, that I saw a person of exalted rank under those very circumstances of delusion, and heard him call upon Mr. Gar- rick to exert himself in the performance of Hamlet. The passage of Horace to which I allude is in the second epistle of the second book, and is the more curious as it specifies distinctly that it was upon this one point only that the gentleman was mad. I will give you the passage :

Fuit baud ignoblis Argis, Qui se credebat miros audire tragcedos, In vacua betas sessor plausorque theatro ; Ctetera qui vita servaret munia recto Store; bonus sane vicinus, amabilis hospes, Comis in uxorem, posset qui ignoscere servis, Et signo leeso non insanire lageme :

Posset qui rupem et puteum vitare-patentem. &c. &e.

Epist. lib. ii. 2. 128.

"In another well-known case, which justified the Lord Chancellor's issuing a writ de lunatico inquirendo, the insanity of the gentleman mani- fested itself in his appropriating every thing to himself, and parting with nothing. When strongly urged to put on a clean shirt, he would-do it, but it must be over the dirty one ; nor would he put off his shoes when he went to bed. He would agree to purchase any thing that was to be sold, but he would not pay for it. He vas, in fact, brought up from the King's Bench prison, where he had been committed for not paying for picture valued at fifteen hundred pounds, which he had agreed to buy; and in giving my opinion to the jury, I recommended it to them to go over to his house, in Portland Place, where they would find fifty thou- sand pounds worth of property of every description; this picture, musical instruments, clocks, baby-houses, and baubles, all huddled in confusion together, on the floor of his dining-room. To such a cage what could ap- ply more closely than the passage—

'Si quis mat citharas, emptas comportet in unum, Nee studio citharw, nec Musie deditus ulli; Si scalpra et forums, non sutor ; nautica vela, Aversus mercaturis: delirus et amens Undique dicatur merito P Ron. Sat. Iih. ii. 3. 104.

"I need not add that the jury found the gentleman insane.

"Thus have some of the descriptions of the poets, held to be imagi- nary, been realized in life. And it is possible, that if the physician were to collect and apply the brief notices of various disorders, which have been thrown out by the great poets of antiquity, he might not only illus- trate the truth of the descriptions drawn by those accurate observers of nature, but derive from them some useful hints to assist him in his own observation of disease."