"nothing: Though between them and a great 66 cause, they should be estem'd nothing. Cleo"patra, catching but the least noise of this, "dies instantly. I have seen her die twenty "times upon far poorer moment &c. &c. *

(Anthony & Cleopatra. A. 1. S. 2.)

* Our Poet pursues this idea in a vein of coarseness, belonging to the age, in which he lived, and according to a species of imagery, which was familiar to the writers of that period. The ideas of Love, Death and Darkness, were in that age and in former times familiarly connected with each other. I have hinted at this union in a preceding page 161, and the Commentators on Shakspeare will supply passages from our ancient writers, in which Death is represented, according to the imagery in Romeo and Juliet, as Amorous and as a Paramour, Death was a familiar Representation on the stage in the times of Shakspeare, and there was no doubt a representation of Death and a Female, as there was of Death and the Fool of the Comedy, from which Shakspeare is acknowledged to have derived his imagery of “Merely thou art Death's Fool"

In the play of Anthony and Cleopatra we have,

"I will be

"A Bridegroom in my Death, and run into it

"As to a Lover's bed."

There are three more allusions in the same play, to the same idea-All this imagery I believe, is from the ancient Mysteries and Moralities, preceding our regular Drama, which were derived from the Mysteries of the ancient World. In the Grecian Cosmogony, which is so beautifully told by Aristophanes, Love springs from Night, amidst the bosom of Erebus, and again Love becomes a producer, mingling with Chaos in the wide extending Tartarus.-This is not the appointed spot, to unfold this imagery, but the reader would indeed marvel, if he were to see before him the various passages in Shakspeare and our ancient writers, in which these ideas are intangled with each other.

We must here observe, what Dr. Cullen and others have duly understood in their conceptions about Mental Irritation, that this faculty of Dying, though imparted to the frame, by an affected passion, produces the same appearances and sufferings on the System which the imitated Disease itself causes; and that it finally migrates, under various degrees of force and malignity,into the very Disorder, which it is intended only to represent by a mimic exhibition.--In the performance of a dexterous Actress, the pulse grows languid, the countenance becomes pale-the breathing faint, and the limbs appear to have lost their power of self motion. Now this could not be effected, unless the nature of the frame co-operated with the feigned process, or in other words, unless the nature of the frame inclined to nervous affections, had first suggested the project of this species of temporary Death, and afforded the means of acquiring so extraordinary an Art.

It ought not however to be concealed, that a more dangerous Art, cannot possibly be practised. At that period, when the frame is in its most efficient state, this trick may performed with safety,and the counterfeiter of Death may reassume at pleasure the functions

be

of

of Life. But when the frame shall become deranged by accidental Disease, or be enfeebled by repeated exhibition; the experiment may not always succeed according to the wishes of the performer. The will may indeed be enabled to suspend the powers of Life, but it may not always have sufficient force to recall those powers into action.

We must observe likewise, that in a state of actual debility arising from a violent Disease, the frame itself, without waiting for the suggestions of the will, may too readily fall into the habits with which it was before familiar; and when ever this accident should arise, there is little hope, that the powers of the system will ever be able by their own efforts to revive the languid action of the organs, which are at once weakened by habitual irritation and violent Disease. In this state, all will be lost, and the catastrophe of the piece, will terminate in the reality of the scene, which had been so often repeated for the purpose of a Mimic shew. The overflowing zeal of an officious Practitioner, if any such be found, obtruding the resources of his Art, would be rejected with abhorrence by the feeling husband himself, scared and confounded

confounded by the delusions of the drama, who would not suffer the exhausted frame of his beloved spouse to be harrassed, under so calm a state, by the violent applications of a daring empiric.

There is a curious story of a French girl, Mary Isabeau by name, who had acquired the Art of dying to such a pitch of dexterity, and was so addicted to its exhibition in the most perfect state, that she suffered herself to be carried from her home three times, in order to be interred, before she could persuade herself to exert her craft in the process of her own revival. Nay so determined was she in doing justice to the perfection of her art, that at the third time of the exhibition, she remained under the semblance of Death,till the bearers were actually letting her down into her grave. According to the sequel of the story, when she really died, as it is expressed, her friends kept her unburied for the space of six days, a most extraordinary time in the customs of France, that the delusion, if any such should be then practised, might flatter as little as possible the vanity of the artist, and that her recovery might take place under least

W

circumstances, which would afford her the least cause for laughing at their mistake.

It is impossible for us not to believe, that this monstrous passion of counterfeiting Death within the brinks of the Grave must have arisen from a morbid mind acting on a morbid frame; and from the co-operation of these causes, such wild conceptions and exhibitions were produced.-There is still another consideration, which must seize upon the mind, when we reflect on this practise of counterfeiting Death, and which it is my duty to unfold. The frame harrassed by those habits of assumed Death, and by incidental Disease, may sink, as I have before observed, into a state of Suspended Animation, which the powers of the system. by their own efforts may be unable to recall. It would be well indeed for this devoted victim to her own arts, if final Death were to close the scene at this period of departed breath; but it may perhaps be, that another Life and another Death are still destined to await the sufferer. The balmy influence of the warm Earth, in which the body is finally deposited, may produce that recovery, which

* See the English work on the UNCERTAINTY OF THE SIGNS OF DEATH. Page, 95.