There still lingered also a feeling of dislike toward madmen, engendered by the early feeling of hostility toward them, which sufficed to prevent for many years any practical reforms.
What that old theory had been, even under the most favourable circumstances and among the best of men, we have seen in the fact that Sir Thomas More ordered acknowledged lunatics to be publicly flogged; and it will be remembered that Shakespeare makes one of his characters refer to madmen as deserving "a dark house and a whip." What the old practice was and continued to be we know but too well.

Taking Protestant England as an example--and it was probably the most humane--we have a chain of testimony.

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Bethlehem Hospital was reported too loathsome for any man to enter; in the seventeenth century, John Evelyn found it no better; in the eighteenth, Hogarth's pictures and contemporary reports show it to be essentially what it had been in those previous centuries.( 380) (380) On Sir Thomas More and the condition of Bedlam, see Tuke, History of the Insane in the British Isles, pp.

63-73.

One of the passages of Shakespeare is in As You Like It, Act iii, scene 2.