It is not difficult to obtain admission to this asylum, for the charge is only a penny or twopence, and Bellamont and his friends in “Northward Ho” look at the “mad Greeks” for a short time before calling for their horses, which are stabled at “the Dolphin without Bishopsgate” near by. The hospital consists of “a parlour, kitchen, and larder below stairs, and twenty-one rooms where the poor distracted people lie, and above stairs eight rooms more for servants”; the madmen may either be visited in their cells, or brought in for inspection by the visitors. Preferring the former alternative we approach the cells, and hear a confused roaring—“the Chimes of Bedlam.” It is “Mad Bess roaring for meat or the Englishman for drink”; like “bells rung backward” they are nothing but “confusion and mere noises.” The “shaking of irons” adds to the din, which is increased by the snatches of coarse song which are continually assailing our ears, the playing of rough games such as “barley-break,” the running and jumping of the more violent of the patients, and the cries of those who are undergoing a treatment of the whip:
“If sad, they cry, If mirth be their conceit, they laugh again; Sometimes they imitate the beasts and birds, Singing or howling, braying, barking, all As their wild fancies prompt ’em.”
When the lunatics are brought in, or (as was more usual in real life though unsuited for dramatic representation), we visit them in their “cages” or cells, we are confronted with a strange sight. A “pretty poet” who “ran mad for a chambermaid” invokes Titania and Oberon, and speaks in the sanest of tones of “daisies, primrose, violets”; his madness, though at the time we do not know it, is feigned. The Englishman is still crying for drink. Everyone must go down on his knees and pledge him: “A thousand pots, and froth ’em, froth ’em!” The parson, “that run mad for tithe goslings,” threatens to excommunicate and curse the whole company. A musician walks slowly and deliberately apart; he fell mad “for love of an Italian dwarf.” Many a lunatic resembles Candido, “much gone indeed,” who believes himself to be a prentice, “talks to himself,” selling “pure calicos, fine hollands, choice cambrics, neat lawns,” and resenting interference in a way which is positively dangerous. Near him is a lad brought in (like Alinda) “a little craz’d, distracted” and not suffering acutely; he is allowed comparative freedom and accorded light treatment till more dangerous symptoms shew themselves. He