Dr. Wycherley, you see, was a collector of mad
people, and collectors are always amateurs, and
very seldom connoisseurs. His turn of mind
co-operating with his interests, led him to put down
any man a lunatic, whose intellect was manifestly
superior to his own. Alfred Hardie, and one or
two more contemporaries, had suffered by this
humour of the good doctor's. Nor did the dead
escape him entirely. Pascal, according to
Wycherley, was a madman with an illusion about
a precipice; John Howard a moral lunatic in
whom the affections were reversed; Saul a moping
maniac with homicidal paroxysms and nocturnal
visions; Paul an incoherent lunatic, who in his
writings flies off at a tangent, and who admits
having once been the victim of a photopsic
illusion in broad daylight; Nebuchadnezzar was a
lycanthropical lunatic; Joan of Arc a theomaniac;
Bobby Burton and Oliver Cromwell were
melancholy maniacs; Napoleon was an ambitious
maniac, in whom the sense of impossibility
became gradually extinguished by visceral and
cerebral derangement; Porson an oinomaniac;
Luther a phrenetic patient of the old demoniac
breed, alluded to by Shakespeare:

One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold.
That is the madman.

But without any disrespect to any of these
gentlemen, he assigned the golden crown of
Insanity to Hamlet. To be sure this character
tells his friends in the play he shall feign
insanity, and swears them not to reveal the reason.
And after this hint to his friends and the audience
(it is notorious he was not written for readers)
he keeps his word, and does it as cleverly as if
his name was David or Brutus instead of Hamlet;
indeed, like Edgar, he rather overdoes it, and so
puzzles his enemies in the play, and certain
German criticasters and English mad doctors in
the closet, and does not puzzle his bosom friend
in the play one bit, nor the pit for whom he was
created. Add to this his sensibility, and his
kindness to others, and his eloquent grief at the
heartrending situation, which his father's and
mother's son was placed in and had brains to
realise, though his psychological critics, it seems,
have not; and add to all that the prodigious
extent of his mind, his keen observation, his deep
reflection, his brilliant fancy united for once in a
way with the great Academic, or judicial, intel
lect, that looks down and sees all the sides of
everything and what can this rare intellectual
compound be? Wycherley decided the question.
Hamlet was too much greater in the world of
mind than S. T. Coleridge and his German
criticasters, too much higher, deeper, and broader than
Esquirol, Pinel, Sauze, Haslam, Munro, Pagan,
Wigan, Prichard, Romberg, Wycherley, and such
small deer, to be anything but a madman.

Now, in their midnight discussions, Dr. Wycherley
more than once alluded to the insanity of
Hamlet; and offered proofs. But Alfred
declined the subject as too puerile. "A man must
exist before he can be insane," said the Oxonian
philosopher, severe in youthful gravity. But,
when he found that Dr. Wycherley, had he lived
in Denmark at the time, would have conferred
cannily with Hamlet's uncle, removed that worthy
relative's disbelief in Hamlet's insanity, and
signed the young gentleman away behind his
back into a lunatic asylum, Alfred began to
sympathise with this posthumous victim of
Psychological Science. "I believe the bloke was no
madder than I am," said he. He got the play,
studied it afresh, compared the fiction with
the legend, compared Hamlet humbugging his
enemies and their tool, Ophelia, with Hamlet
opening his real mind to himself or his Horatio
the very next moment; contrasted the real
madness the author has portrayed in the plays of
Hamlet and Lear by the side of these extravagant
imitations, to save, if possible, even dunces,
and dreamers, and criticasters from being taken
in by the latter; and at their next séance pitched
into the doctor's pet chimera, and what with
logic, fact, ridicule, and the author's lines,
knocked it to atoms double quick.

Now, in their midnight discussions Dr. Wycherley
had always handled the question of
Alfred Hardie's Sanity or Insanity with a
philosophical coolness the young man admired, and
found it hard to emulate; but this philosophic
calmness deserted him the moment Hamlet's
insanity was disputed, and the harder he was
pressed, the redder, the angrier, the louder, the
more confused the Psychological physician
became; and presently he got furious, and burst
out of the anti-spasmodic or round-about style,
and called Alfred a d—d ungrateful, insolent
puppy, and went stamping about the room; and,
finally, to the young man's horror, fell down in a
fit of an epileptic character, grinding his teeth
and foaming at the mouth.

Alfred was filled with regret, and, though
alarmed, had the presence of mind not to call for
assistance. The fit was a very mild one in reality,
though horrible to look at. The doctor came to,
and asked feebly for wine. Alfred got it him, and
the doctor, with a mixture of cunning and alarm
in his eye, said he had fainted away, or nearly.
Alfred assented coaxingly, and looked sheepish.
After this he took care never to libel Hamlet's
intellect again by denying his insanity; for he
was now convinced of what he had long half
suspected, that the doctor had a bee in his own
bonnet; and Alfred had studied true insanity all
this time, and knew how inhumane it is to oppose
a monomaniac's foible; it only infuriates and
worries him. No power can convince him.

But now he resolved to play on the doctor's
foible. It went against his conscience; but the
temptation was so strong. He came to him with
a hang-dog air:

"Doctor," said he, "I have been thinking over
your arguments, and I capitulate. If Hamlet
ever existed, he was as mad as a March hare."
And he blushed at this his first quibble.

Dr. Wycherley beamed with satisfaction.