This sudden mania for long journeys on Aylmer's part was a most annoying hobby.

Our various fashionable manias, for charity one season, for science the next, are only so many clever contrivances for keeping our neighbour at arm's length.

Their mania was an excessive simplification of argument; they put high-sounding words in the place of reason, and made too much of a few ideas, always the same, lifeless for lack of colour or shading.

Then we have the village lunatic, whose mania is "religious enthusiasm."