The Miniature

Calling one day on a friend, who had amassed a large collection of
autographs, and other manuscript curiosities, he showed me a small
quarto volume, which had been bequeathed to him by a relative, a
physician, who for many years had been in extensive practice in
London.

'He attended the patients at a private asylum for insane persons of
the better classes,' said my friend, 'and I have often heard him speak
of the writer of that beautiful MS, a gentleman of good family, who
had been an inmate of ---- House upwards of thirty years,' at the time
he was first called to attend him.

On looking over the volume, I found it filled with scraps of poetry,
extracts from classic authors, and even from the Talmudic writers; but
what interested me most was a narrative of several pages, which
appeared so circumstantially related as to leave little doubt of its
being partly, if not wholly, founded on fact. I begged permission to
make a transcript, which was readily granted, and the result is before
the reader.