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THE

TRAGEDY OF LIFE:

BEING RECORDS OF

REMARKABLE PHASES OF LUNACY,

KEPT BY A PHYSICIAN.

BY JOHN H. BRENTEN.

OUR towns and cities are but so many dwellings of human misery, in which grief
and sorrow, innumerable troubles, labours of mortal men, and all manner of vices,
are included as in so many pens. Our villages are like molehills, and men as so
many emmets, busy, busy, still going to and fro, in and out, crossing one another's
projects, as the lines of several sea cards cut each other in a map. Now light and
merry, by and by sorrowful and heavys now hoping, then distrusting; now patient,
to-morrow crying out; now pale, then red, running, sitting, trembling, sweating,
halting, &c.-BURTON.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

250. b. 80.

SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.

M.DCCC.LXI.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

ODL

THE TRAGEDY OF LIFE.

MAD OR NOT MAD?

CHAPTER I.

HOW THE RECTOR LIVED AND HOW HE

DIED.

"ON the 20th of last month, at the Rectory, much respected, the Rev. Louis Lackingham, aged 67, for many years Rector of Basset cum Wintleton"-When I was a boy, I used often to run my eye over the announcement of deaths in the columns of The Times, and consider with myself, in a desultory fashion, which of the various deceased parties were most to have been envied in their respective lives, and, in the case of an enforced exchange between their position

VOL. I.

1

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