when the current idea of heaven
was that of a place where people could hack each other to pieces through
all eternity, and when the man who refused a challenge was punished with
confiscation of his estates. With these Northmen, in the ninth century,
the chief business and amusement in life was to set sail for some
pleasant country, like Spain or France, and make all the coasts and
navigable rivers hideous with rapine and massacre. When at home, in the
intervals between their freebooting expeditions, they were liable to
become possessed by a strange homicidal madness, during which they would
array themselves in the skins of wolves or bears, and sally forth by
night to crack the backbones, smash the skulls, and sometimes to drink
with fiendish glee the blood of unwary travellers or loiterers. These
fits of madness were usually followed by periods of utter exhaustion and
nervous depression. [77]

Such, according to the unanimous testimony of historians, was the
celebrated "Berserker rage," not peculiar to the Northland, although
there most conspicuously manifested. Taking now a step in advance, we
find that in comparatively civilized countries there have been many
cases of monstrous homicidal insanity. The two most celebrated cases,
among those collected by Mr. Baring-Gould, are those of the Marechal
de Retz, in 1440, and of Elizabeth, a Hungarian countess, in the
seventeenth century. The Countess Elizabeth enticed young girls into
her palace on divers pretexts, and then coolly murdered them, for the
purpose of bathing in their blood. The spectacle of human suffering
became at last such a delight to her, that she would apply with her
own hands the most excruciating tortures, relishing the shrieks of her
victims as the epicure relishes each sip of his old Chateau Margaux.
In this way she is said to have murdered six hundred and fifty
persons before her evil career was brought to an end; though, when one
recollects the famous men in buckram and the notorious trio of crows,
one is inclined to strike off a cipher, and regard sixty-five as a
sufficiently imposing and far less improbable number. But the case of
the Marechal de Retz is still more frightful. A marshal of France, a
scholarly man, a patriot, and a man of holy life, he became suddenly
possessed by an uncontrollable desire to murder children. During seven
years he continued to inveigle little boys and girls into his castle,
at the rate of about TWO EACH WEEK, (?) and