The Spectre-Smitten by Samuel Warren — Read

Few topics of medical literature have occasioned more wide and contradictory speculation than that of insanity, with reference, as well to its predisposing and immediate causes, as to its best method of treatment. Since experience is the only substratum of real knowledge, the surest way of arriving at those principles which may regulate our researches, especially concerning the subtle disorder mania, is, when one does meet with some well-marked case, to watch it closely throughout, and be particularly anxious to seize on all those more transient indications, which are truer characteristics of the complaint than perhaps any other. With this object did I pay close attention to the very singular case detailed in the following narrative. The apparent eccentricity of the title will be found accounted for in the course of the narrative.

Mr M, as one of a very large party, had been enjoying the splendid hospitality of Lady--, and did not leave till a late, or rather early, hour in the morning. Pretty women, music, and champagne had almost turned his head, and it was rather fortunate for him that a hackney-coach stand was within a stone's-throw of the house he was leaving. Muffling his cloak closely around him, he contrived to move towards it in a tolerably direct line, and a few moments' time beheld him driving, at the usual snail's pace of those rickety vehicles, to Lincoln's Inn; for Mr M was a law student. In spite of the transient exhilaration produced by the scenes he had just quitted, and the excitement consequent on the prominent share he took in an animated though accidental discussion, in the presence of about thirty of the most elegant women that could well be brought together, he found himself becoming the subject of a most unaccountable depression of spirits.