f the most extended signification; and we speak with
equal correctness when we say the interval of a moment and of a thousand
years. The time necessary to comprise a LUCID interval has not, to the
best of my belief, been limited by medical writers or legal
authorities; it must however comprehend a portion sufficient to satisfy
the inquirer, that the individual, whose intellect had been disordered,
does not any longer retain any of the symptoms that constituted his
malady; and this presumes on the part of the examiner an intimate
knowledge of the unfounded prejudices, delusions, or incapacities with
which the mind of the party had been affected, and also deliberate and
repeated investigations to ascertain that they are wholly effaced.

IMBECILITY.

THERE is another subject connected in a legal point of view with the
nature of the human mind, and with the state of its morbid conditions,
on which I respectfully solicit your Lordship's elucidation. In your
Lordship's judgment of 1815, on the Portsmouth petition, it is laid down
that "from the moment that (meaning this questionable and disputed
unsoundness) had been established, down to this moment, it appears to me
however to have been at the same time established, that _whatever_ may
be the degree of weakness or imbecility of the party,--_whatever_ may be
the degree of incapacity of the party to manage his own affairs, if the
finding of the jury is only that he was of an extreme imbecility of
mind, that he has an inability to manage his own affairs; if they will
not proceed to infer from that, in their finding upon oath, that he is
of _unsound mind_, they have not established by the result of the
inquiry, a case upon which the Chancellor can make a grant, constituting
a committee either of the person or estate. All the cases decide that
mere imbecility will not do: that an inability to manage a man's affairs
will not do, unless that inability and that incapacity to manage his
affairs, AMOUNT to evidence that he is of _unsound mind_: and he must be
found to be so."

A conclusion is here drawn that the establishment of _unsoundness_
necessarily involves, that the extreme degree of imbecility and
incapacity of mind does not constitute this unsoundness: that is,--they
may exist in the extreme degree, (or citing the words employed,) in any
degree WHATEVER, which implies the ne plus ultra, without any resulting
UNSOUNDNESS. This is a dictum, which proceeding from your Lordsh