2 NOVEMBER 1895, Page 19

It is satisfactory to find that the Commissioners in Lunacy

are not in the least disposed to endorse the absurd view of a London doctor that, because a young woman wishes to commit what he, and indeed most other people, regard as " social suicide," she ought to be put under restraint as a lunatic. Miss Lanchester, who has been made too much of a heroine for the firmness with which she has stuck to her &termination to eschew marriage with her lover till the marriage-laws are what she thinks they ought to be, though not to eschew living with him, was sent to an asylum,—under a medical certificate which never ought to have been given,— by her father and brothers, actuated by a very natural and pardonable, though perfectly indefensible, intention to arrest a fatally false step. Directly, however, the Commissioners in Lunacy understood the nature of the case, they ordered Miss Lanchester's release, and she was released on Wednesday last, and is now at full liberty to follow her own perverse deter- mination, if the Marquis of Queensberry does not succeed in dissuading her by his conditional testimonial to the courage of her so-called " protest" against the marriage-laws.