ers feel for
their predecessors, concurred, that lunatics were not only persons of
disordered mind, but that their intellectual aberrations corresponded
with certain changes of the moon: and this lunar hypothesis which had
beguiled the medical profession, will furnish a sufficient apology for
its adoption by the lawyer. It is a necessary consequence, if the moon,
at certain periods, shed a baneful influence on the human intellect,
that the intermediate periods would be exempt from its contamination;
or, speaking more technically, at certain phases of that luminary, a
person would be visited by an insane paroxysm, and at others, experience
a lucid interval. The belief in these alternations of insanity and
reason, is perspicuously stated in your Lordship's judgment of 1815, on
the Portsmouth petition. "The question whether he was a lunatic, being a
question admitting, in the solution of it, of a decision that imputed to
him, at one time, an _extremely sound mind_, but at other times, an
occurrence of insanity, with reference to which it was necessary to
guard his person and his property by a commission issuing."

Notwithstanding it must be admitted that

"There are more things in heaven and earth
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy;"

yet, in the present times, our faith in the influence of the lunar
aspects has considerably abated, and we employ the term lunatic as a
familiar expression, to denote a person of insane mind, without any
reference to its derivation, or supposed ascendency of the moon, which
my own observations have tended to disprove:--but as the phrase lucid
interval is, in its legal sense, connected with lunatic, some
investigation of its meaning becomes absolutely necessary.

If it were the real character of lunacy, after the visitation of the
paroxysm, to leave the patient in the possession of an _extremely sound
mind_, this disorder would be rendered much less formidable than we now
consider it, and might in its effects be compared to those violent
storms of thunder and lightning that purify the atmosphere and dispense
salutary refreshment; and it is not improbable, that some, gifted by
nature with mediocrity of talent, but of a philosophical turn and
aspiring pretensions, might regard the occurrence of such paroxysm as a
desideratum, rather than an evil, on account of the _extreme soundness_
they would experience afterwards: it is moreover evident, that however
degraded the lunatic may