somehow or other, everything he eat _tasted of porridge_." This dilemma
could be no great wonder to the friend to whom the poor patient
communicated it, who knew the lunatic eat nothing but this simple
aliment at any of his meals. The case was obvious. The disease lay in
the extreme vivacity of the patient's imagination, deluded in other
instances, yet not absolutely powerful enough to contend with the honest
evidence of his stomach and palate, which, like Lord Peter's brethren in
"The Tale of a Tub," were indignant at the attempt to impose boiled
oatmeal upon them, instead of such a banquet as Ude would have displayed
when peers were to partake of it. Here, therefore, is one instance of
actual insanity, in which the sense of taste controlled and attempted to
restrain the ideal hypothesis adopted by a deranged imagination. But the
disorder to which I previously alluded is entirely of a bodily
character, and consists principally in a disease of the visual organs,
which present to the patient a set of spectres or appearances which have
no actual existence. It is a disease of the same nature which renders
many men incapable of distinguishing colours; only the patients go a
step further, and pervert the external form of objects. In their case,
therefore, contrary to that of the maniac, it is not the mind, or rather
the imagination, which imposes upon and overpowers the evidence of the
senses, but the sense of seeing (or hearing) which betrays its duty and
conveys false ideas to a sane intellect.

More than one learned physician, who have given their attestations to
the existence of this most distressing complaint, have agreed that it
actually occurs, and is occasioned by different causes. The most
frequent source of the malady is in the dissipated and intemperate
habits of those who, by a continued series of intoxication, become
subject to what is popularly called the Blue Devils, instances of which
mental disorder may be known to most who have lived for any period of