Gentlemen,—I feel I owe the honour of having been selected to deliver this first Maudsley Lecture, not to any special fitness I possess to expone any of the more recent developments of that branch of medicine, the furtherance of which the lectureship is intended to promote, but to the fact that I am almost the last survivor of those who were associated with the founder of the lectureship in the early days of his professional career. While still a student at the University, Maudsley was revealed to me in a brilliant essay on Edgar Allan Poe, which was published in the Journal of Mental Science in April, 1860, and which, although too scathing and denunciatory of the ill-fated poet, as it now appears, was so rich in insight, originality and happy similitudes as to betoken unmistakably “the lighting of another taper at Heaven,” which was at that time Maudsley's way of describing the arrival of a new man of genius on the scene. A few years later I made Maudsley's personal acquaintance at the table of that gracefully-refined and highly-gifted physician and philanthropist, Dr. John Conolly, who afterwards became his father-in-law, and in the years following I can recall many memorable meetings with him at “The Lawn,” at Hanwell, in his rooms in Queen Anne Street, and in a restaurant in Soho, where, over frugal meals, he and I and Lockhart Robertson, and Broadbent and Harrington Tuke and Baron Mundy of Moravia, the zealous advocate of non-sequestration and family life and free air for the insane, held high discourse and adumbrated projects for the future of lunacy, some of which have taken shape since then, while others remain unrealised and perhaps unrealisable.