If ever I become a trifle eccentric I shall take it very ill of my friends and relatives if they shut me up with anyone more demented than themselves. It has always seemed to me both extravagant and unkind to put a more or less amateur and occasional lunatic among hard-bitten professionals. Mild madmen are better with their families and their families better with them. As for madmen with no or reluctant families, why not attach them to religious communities as jesters were attached to royal households in the Middle Ages? This would be an excellent plan all round. The community could concentrate on one official imbecile the forbearance they now exercise on each other. And the imbecile, unlike the average religious, could lap himself round with forbearance as with a garment, and hug the warmth. This, at any rate, was how it worked with the only lunatic I ever met in such circumstances—John-Theodore de la Vigne of Cope in the County of Wessex, the Pensioner of the Pied Brothers.