Madness

,—in political life, an over-heated brain with disappointed ambition. It has lately appeared in distempered ravings against the French, in vehement gesticulatioon, in throwing down a dagger in the midst of an intermperate speech, and in writing books full of obscurity and mysticism, filled with extravagant fictions and false rhetoric. The case of one Edmund Burke, who has been lately afflicted with this disease, will illustrate the ordinary phænomena of this mania. See the list of patients, most of them incurables, in the history of St. Stephen’s Hospital.