From the other side of the passage, or wide corridor, opened the rooms in which the meals were served up; and here we may observe that the food allowed the inmates of Bethlem Hospital is both excellent in quality and abundant in quantity.
There was a very tall officer,—indeed, all the male keepers throughout the institution are tall, strong, and well-built men,—walking slowly up and down the passage of which we are speaking; and when any of the unhappy lunatics addressed him, he replied to them in a kind and conciliatory manner, or else good-naturedly humoured them by listening with apparent interest and attention to the lamentable outpourings of their erratic intellects.
It is delightful to turn from those descriptions of ill-disciplined prisons and of vicious or tyrannical institutions, which it has been our duty to record in this work,—it is delightful to turn from such pictures to an establishment which, though awakening many melancholy thoughts, nevertheless excites our admiration and demands our unbounded praise, as a just tribute to the benevolence, the wisdom, and the humanity which constitute the principles of its administration.
Oh! could the great—the philanthropic Pinel rise from the cold tomb and visit this institution of which we are speaking,—he would see ample proof to convince him that, while on earth, he had not lived nor toiled in vain.
Connected with the male department of Bethlem, there are a library and a billiard-room, for the use of those who are sufficiently sane to enjoy the mental pleasures of the one or the innocent recreation of the other. The books in the library are well selected: they consist chiefly of the works of travellers and voyagers, naval and military histories and biographies, and the leading cheap periodicals—such as The London Journal, Chambers's Information for the People, Knight's Penny Magazine, &c.
Communicating with the female department of the asylum, is a music-room,—small, but elegantly fitted up, and affording a delightful means of amusement and solace to many of the inmates of that division of the building.
When these attentions to the comforts and even happiness,—for Bethlem Hospital exhibits many examples where "ignorance is bliss,"—of those who are doomed to dwell within its walls, are contrasted with the awful and soul-harrowing spectacle which its interior presented not very many years ago, it is impossible to feel otherwise than astonished and enraptured at the vast improvements which civilisation has introduced into the modern management of the insane!
But let us return to Henry Holford.
We left him threading the long passage which formed a portion of his way towards the criminal department of the hospital,—that department which was thenceforth to be his abode!
It may be readily imagined that he gazed anxiously and intently on all he saw,—that not a single object of such new, strange, and yet mournful interest to him escaped his observation.