cowardice, (for a man who would shudder at a bat or a vague idea, may be bold as a lion against an enemy), but imaginative fear ;fear either of something known or of the patient knows not what ;— a vague sense of terror,-an impulse,- -an apprehension of ill,dwelling upon some painful and worrying thought. Now this suf fering is inevitably connected with a weak state of the body in some respects, particularly of the stomach. Hundreds will be found to have felt it, if patients enquire; but the mind is sometimes afraid of acknowledging it's apprehensions even to itself; and thus fear broods over and hatches fear. These disorders, generally speaking, are greater or less in their effects according to the exercise of reason. But do not let the word be misunderstood: we should rather say, according to the extent of the information. A very imaginative man will indeed be likely to suffer more than others; but if his knowledge is at all in proportion, he will also get through his evil better than an uninformed man suffering great terrors. And the reason is, that he knows how much bodily unhealthiness has to do with it. The very words that frighten the unknowing, might teach them better, if understood. Thus insanity itself properly means nothing but unhealthiness or unsoundness. Derangement explains itself, and may surely mean very harmless things. Melancholy is compounded of two words, which signify dark bile. Hypochondria is the name of one of the regions of the stomach, a very instructive etymology. And lunacy refers to effects, real or imaginary, of particular states of the moon; which if any thing after all, are nothing more than what every delicate constitution feels in its degree from particular states of the weather; for weather, like the tides, is apt to be in such and such a condition, when the moon presents such and such a face. It has been said, Great wits to madness nearly are allied. It is curious that he who wrote the saying (Dryden) was a very sound wit to the end of his life; while his wife, who was of a weak understanding, became insane. An excellent writer (Wordsworth) has written an idle couplet about the insanity of poets: We poets enter on our path with gladness, But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. If he did not mean madness in the ordinary sense, he should not have written this line; if he did, he ought not to have fallen, in the teeth of his information, into so vulgar an error. There are very few instances of insane poets, or of insane great understandings of any sort. Bacon, Milton, Newton, Shakspeare, Cervantes, &c. were all of minds as sound as they were great. So it has been with the infinite majority of literary men of all countries. If Tasso and a few others were exceptions, they were but exceptions; and the de rangement in these eminent men has very doubtful characters about it, and is sometimes made a question. It may be pretty safely affirmed, at least, upon an examination of it, that had they not been the clever men they were, it would have been much worse and less equivocal. Collins, whose case was after all one of inanition rather than insanity, had been a free liver; and seems to have been hurt by having a fortune left him. Cowper was weak-bodied, and beset by Methodists. Swift's body was full of bad humours. He himself attributed his disordered system to the effects of a surfeit of fruit on his stomach; and in his last illness he used to break out in enormous biles and blisters. This was a violent effort of nature to help and purify the current of his blood,—the main object in all such Dr. Johnson, who was subject to mists of melancholy, used to fancy he should go mad; but he never did. cases. Exercise, conversation, chearful society, amusements of all sorts, or a kind, patient, and gradual helping of the bodily health, till the mind be capable of amusement (for it should never foolishly be told "not to think" of melancholy things, without having something done for it to mend the bodily health),-these are the cures, the only cures, and in our opinion the almost infallible cures of nervous disorders, however excessive. Above all, the patient should be told, that there has often been an end to that torment of one haunting idea, which is indeed a great and venerable suffering. Many persons have got over it in a week, a few weeks, or a month, some in a few months, some not for years, but they have got over it at last. There is a remarkable instance of this in the life of our great king Alfred. He was seized, says his contemporary biographer, with such a strange illness while sitting at table in the twenty-fifth year (we think) of his age, that he shrieked aloud; and for twenty years afterwards this illness so preyed upon him, that the relief of one hour was embittered by what he dreaded would come the next. His disorder is conjectured by some to have been an internal cancer; by others, with more probability, the black bile, or melancholy. The physicians of those times knew nothing about it; and the people shewed at once their ignorance, and their admiration of the king, by saying that the devil had caused it out of jealousy. It was probably produced by anxiety for the state of his country; but the same thing which wounded him might have helped to keep him up; for he had plenty of business to attend to, and fought with his own hand in fifty-six pitched battles. Now exactly twenty years after, in the forty-fifth year of his age (if our former recollection is right) this disorder totally left him; and his great heart was where it ought to be, in a heaven of health and calmness. Orders received by the Booksellers, by the Newsmen, and by the Publisher, Joseph Appleyard, 19, Catherine-street, Strand.-Price Twopence. Printed by C. H. Reynell, No. 45, Broad-street, Golden-square, London. There he arriving round about doth flie, mofigonzosno div And takes survey with busie, curious eye: Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly.SPENSER. No. VIII-WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1st, 1819. -zigami bum, &nofexing & THE world never feels so cheerless as when it is undergoing mists and fogs. As long as there are objects to look at, it is hard if we cannot find something to entertain our thoughts; but when the world itself is shut out from our observation; when the same mists that shut it out, come clinging round about us with cold; and when we think what the poor are likely to suffer from the approaching winter, we seem to feel, not only that we are dreary, but that we ought to be so. come 20 And so we ought, as far as our own dreariness will the more excite us to relieve that of others. Sympathy is our first duty, let it co either in the shape of pain or pleasure. But when we have done our duty to others; when we have refused, as much as us lies, to take our own pleasures till we have done what we can to s share them with others, whether by a fortunate power to bestow, or by other personal helping, less fortunate but sometimes more noble, or even by nothing but the dissemination of instructed and chearful thoughts,-smiles, which even a poverty-stricken hand may sometimes sow in the warm earth of humanity, then we have the fullest right to gather enjoyment from all we can; and then also, because we have the fullest right, we have the greatest power. And yet at the same time, when we speak of right, we ar are struck with the inconclusiveness which is to be found in decisions, apparently the kindest as well as most useful. Who shall say what is the greater right, which any one human being, under all the circumstances which modify his character, has beyond any other to be made happy? However, there seems a great difference between man and man in the actual amount of their enjoyments; and if the great silence of Nature keeps us in ignorance of the reason (for superstition does but perplex the matter, instead of unfolding it), it is a comforting reflection, not only that the general yearning of things sis towards happiness, but that happiness is produced, in proportion as the yearning is general and sympathetic; in other words, in proportion as it tends to the greatest sum of happiness. Behold one of the advantages of fogs and mists! If the southern nations, with their sunshine and clear air, are more joyous than we are, and have a greater but vaguer instinct to make others partake 2nd Edition. of their pleasure, our greater share of melancholy sets us upon scheming how to turn that instinct of humanity to the best account. It is thus that England, though slow to enjoy, has of old been quick to relieve; has had the chief hand in giving those great lifts to the world in knowledge and liberty, for which the sunny Italian was too idle and contented. It is from the same cause, that our great poets (with one exception perhaps as to grandeur of invention) are greater than those of Italy. They have seen the dark as well as the bright side of things; and their knowledge of both, gives to their writings a depth of charity as well as imagination, pre-eminently human. All the things that can be said for human nature, as well as about it's passions and imaginings, are to be found perhaps in Shakspeare, and in Shakspeare only; but his contemporaries had a good share of the same gentle spirit of arbitration. On the other hand, where the English do not cultivate the more genial part of experience, they are likely to err more than most nations for pain, when it does not turn into knowledge, is apt to turn into sullenness and malignity. It's reliefs also become of the grossest and most t selfish nature; and nothing can be more disgustingly pitiable than a gross arrogant Englishman, who in the plenitude of his egotism talks against vanity; and in the midst of the most selfish and sordid vices,-money-scraping, or gormandizing, or drinking, or cock-fighting,-thinks himself entitled to despise other nations, whose vices are rather the excesses of sympathy. Such a man is not worthy of his very fogs; for even they have their bright sides, and help to increase the comforts of our houses. And now then to say something of their merits and treatment. Fogs and mists, being nothing but vapours which the cold air will not suffer to evaporate, must have body enough to present a gorgeous aspect next the sun. To the eye of an eagle, or whatever other eyes there may be to look down upon them, they must appear like masses of cloudy gold. In fact, they are but clouds unrisen. The city of London, at the time we are writing this article, is literally a city in the clouds. It's inhabitants walk through the same airy heaps which at other times float far over their heads in the sky, or minister with glorious faces to the setting sun. We do not say, that any one can "hold a fire in his hand," by thinking on a fine sunset; or that sheer imagination of any sort can make it a very agreeable thing to feel as if one's body were wrapped round with cold wet paper; much less to flounder through gutters, or run against posts. But the mind can often help itself with agreeable images against disagreeable ones; or pitch itself round to the best sides and aspects of them. The solid and fiery ball of the sun, stuck, as it were, in the thick foggy atmosphere; the moon just winning her way through it, into beams; nay, the very candles and gas-lights in the shop windows of a misty evening,-all have, in our eyes, their agreeable varieties of contrast to the surrounding haze. We have even halted, of a dreary autumnal evening, at that open part of the Strand by St. Clement's, and seen the church, which is a poor structure of itself, take an aspect of ghastly grandeur from the dark atmosphere; looking like a tall white mast mounting up interminably into the night overhead. The poets, who are the common friends that keep up the intercourse between nature and humanity, have in numberless passages done justice to these our melancholy visitors, and shewn us what grand personages they are. To mention only a few of the most striking. When Thetis in Homer's Iliad (Book 1, V. 359.) rises out of the sea to console Achilles, she issues forth in a mist; like the gigantic Genius in the Arabian Nights. The reader is to suppose that the mist, after ascending, comes gliding over the water; and condensing itself into a human shape, lands the white-footed goddess on the shore. When Achilles, after his long and vindictive absence from the Greek armies, re-appears in consequence of the death of his friend Patroclus, and stands before the appalled Trojan armies, who are thrown into confusion at the very sight. Minerva, to render his aspect the more astonishing and awful, puts about his head a halo of golden mist, streaming upwards with fire (Book 18, v. 205.) He shouts aloud under this preternatural diadem; Minerva throws into his shout her own immortal voice with a strange unnatural cry; at which the horses of the Trojan warriors run round with their chariots; and twelve of their noblest captains perish in the crush. A mist was the usual clothing of the gods, when they descended to earth; especially of Apollo, whose brightness had double need of mitigation. Homer, to heighten the dignity of Ulysses, has finely given him the same covering, when he passes through the court of Antinous, and suddenly appears before the throne. This has been turned to happy account by Virgil, and to a new and noble one by Milton. Virgil makes Æneas issue suddenly from a mist, at the moment when his friends think him lost, and the beautiful Queen of Carthage is wishing his presence. Milton, but we will give one or two of his minor uses of mists, by way of making a climax of the one alluded to. If Satan, for instance, goes lurking about Paradise, it is “like a black mist low creeping.' If the angels on guard glide about it, upon their gentler errand, it is like fairer vapours; och pub dessen ose On the ground Gliding meteorous, as evening mist Risen from a river o'er the marish glides, And gathers ground fast at the labourer's heel Now behold one of his greatest imaginations. The fallen demi-gods are assembled in Pandæmonium, waiting the return of their “ great adventurer" from his "search of worlds." He through the midst unmarked, In show plebeian angel militant Of lowest order, passed; and from the door Ascended his high throne; which, under state |