serves. The clock is on the landing-place between the two room, doors, where it ticks audibly but quietly; and the landing-place, as well as the stairs, is carpeted to a nicety. The house is most in chaẻ racter, and properly coeval, if it is in a retired suburb, and strongly built, with wainscot rather thau paper inside, and lockers in the windows. Before the windows also should be some quivering poplars. Here the Old Lady receives a few quiet visitors to tea and perhaps an early game at cards; or you may sometimes see her going out on the same kind of visit herself, with a light umbrella turning up into a stick and crooked ivory handle, and her little dog equally famous for his love to her and captious antipathy to strangers. Her grandchildren dislikes him on holidays; and the boldest sometimes, ventures to give him a sly kick under the table. When she returns at night, she ap pears, if the weather happens to be doubtful, in a calash; and her servant, in pattens, follows half behind and half at her side, with a lanthorn. Her opinions are not many, nor new. She thinks the Clergyman a nice man. The Duke of Wellington, in her opinion, is a very great man; but she has a secret preference for the Marquis of Granby. She thinks the young women of the present day too forward, and the men not respectful enough; but hopes her grandchildren will be better; though she differs with her daughter in several points respecting their management. She sets little value on the new accomplishments is a great though delicate connoisseur iu butcher's meat and all sort of housewifery: and if you mention waltzes, expatiates on the grace and fine breeding of the minuet. She longs to have seen bue Ulanced by Sir Charles Grandison, whom she almost considers; as a real person. She likes a walk of a summer's evening, but avoids the new streets, canals, &c. and sometimes goes through the church-yard where her other children and her husband lie buried, serious but not melancholy. She has had three great æras in her life, her marriage,—her having been at court to see the King and Queen and Royal Family,➡ and a compliment on her figure she once received in passing from Mr. Wilkes, whom she describes as a sad loose man, but engaging.Alis plainness she thinks much exaggerated. If any thing takes her at a distance from home, it is still the Court; but she seldom stirs even for that. The last time but one that she went was to see the Duke of Wirtemberg and she has lately been, most probably for the last time of all, to see the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. From this beatific vision, she returned with the same admiration as ever for the fine comely appearance of the Duke of York and the rest of the family, and great delight at having had a near view of the Princess, whom she speaks of with smiling pomp and lifted mittens, clasping them as passionately as she can together, and calling her, in a sort of transport of mixed loyalty and self-love, a fine royal young creature, and Daughter of England. Printed and published by JOSEPH APPLEYARD, No. 19, Catherine-street, Strand. Price 2d. And sold also by A. GLIDDON, Importer of Snuffs, No. 31, Tavistockstreet, Covent-garden. Orders received at the above places, and by all Book. sellers and Newsmen. THE INDICATOR. There he arriving round about doth flie, SPENSER. No. LXI.-WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6th, 1820. BAD TEMPER, MEANNESS, AND OTHER DISORDERS.* THERE is one of the most obvious and commonest analogies, to which we do not pay sufficient attention, though its language is perpetually in our mouths. We mean that between mind and body. In speaking of these dissimilar but at the same time inseparable and sympathizing moieties of our nature, we borrow from each of them, and apply to both indiscriminately, a set of phrases and epithets, which if we reflected upon what we talked, would be of infinite service to us in the treatment of ourselves; but it is the fate of good phrases, as well as good things, to share the odium of common-place in proportion as their utility and popular use have borne testimony to their merits; and the common language of society, made up of all sorts of profound inferences and combinations, would present to a being of a superior nature, a curious instance of a whole race of rational animals talking like philosophers and thinking like fools. Every one is familiar with the epithets which mind furnishes to body, and body furnishes to mind. Such and such a person is said to have a strong intellect, his mind is well informed, that is, well shaped or fashioned,-his apprehension has a fine tact or touch, he is a man of taste, a man of sound thinking, a man of parts:-then, at the same time, his figure is graceful, his gestures are easy and unaffected, he has an intelligent eye, a lively smile, a decided but amiable countenance. Donne, who suffers no such analogies to escape him, handles this sympathy of mind and body with great elegance, and carries it just as far as it will bear-a great piece of moderation with him. Speaking of a lovely female, he says, Her pure and eloquent blood Shone in her skin, and so distinctly wrought, *From a paper of the Editor's in a Magazine published in 1811, called the Reflector. VOL. II. this t Accordingly if the person above-mentioned falls sick, if his smile becomes less lively, and his countenance less animated,-if the body in short loses its accustomed powers, the remedy is immediately suggested by the mind ;- we must go up to the cause of the disorder; in doing away the cause we do away the effect; and is the common maxim of physicians. But here the analogy ceases, or rather the practical application of it. In spite of our common phrases of strong mind and weak mind, of sound mind and diseased mind, people forget that the principle of bodily cure is equally that of mental. It is true, they acknowledge it in their common talk, but it is without thinking. Their philosophers have made a maxim of it, but their philosophers themselves have neglected it; and while every body looks to the cause of his bodily ailments, or calls in the physician, or thanks his friend for giving him advice upon it, the commonest mental infirmity is suffered to increase without notice; the clergyman, who is the constituted doctor on these occasions, would think you mad to apply to him on the subject; and the friend who should advise you to think seriously of the cause of it, would stand a good chance of being turned out of the house. A person, for instance, has a tooth-ache or a head-ache, and he immediately begins to consider how he came by it: he says to himself, "I have been sitting in a draught," or "I was up too late last night," or "I have been drinking too much." Accordingly it is probable that he finds out the real cause of his complaint, and is enabled to avoid it in future or should he fail to discover it himself, his physician or his friend may do it for him. But let the same man get the temper, or be seized with a fit of envy, or fall into a habit of stinginess, all of them maladies of an alarming nature and a thousand times more tormenting than head-aches or tooth-aches, and instead of searching into the cause of the disease, he is sure to begin glossing it over to himself and encouraging its continuance: the spiritual physician does not think of interfering; and friends, who have been officious or honest enough on such occasions to give advice, have generally given it so badly or found it so badly received, that the disorder has grown worse than ever. Το probe the wound is in general only to make the patient worse. him that his head-ache is owing to drinking wine, and he will agree with you; but tell him he is ill-tempered because somebody broke his wine-glass, and his sullenness changes into anger. "Ill-tempered !" he will exclaim:-"I ill-tempered! Come, that's excessively ridiculous. Never was man of a better temper than myself; but the fact is, it is on account of my good temper that I am so treated." So saying, he becomes twenty times worse, calls his wife "cursedly obedient,' kicks a dog for being lazy whom he has taught to lie on a cushion,slaps his child for doing something which he suffers it to do every other hour of its life; and woe betide the servant or the dependent who happens to be in his reach for the rest of the day. The envious man, in like manner, takes every possible means of persuading himself that in holding up every body as a fool, coxcomb, or knave, he is only justifiably severe or nobly contemptuous: he feels the torment of his disorder; he has no comfort in what gives pleasure to other people; the Tell sunshine of other faces makes him sick; and yet instead of looking into the cause of his mental soreness, he takes pains to make it worse in proportion as it galls him, and presents as lamentable a spectacle as an invalid who should sit pounding his own bruises or thumping his aching head. The miser's folly we have been accustomed from our infancy to hear compared to a dropsical thirst, which increases at every draught; but let us look at the more familiar instance of what is called stinginess, or a habit of mean economy, that is to say, an economy disproportionate to the necessity, and betraying itself as much by what it freely offers as by what it niggardly withholds. Those who are guilty of this vice lead a desperate life, especially if they see any company. No people take so much pains to deceive themselves and others, and no people succeed worse. You know them instantly by their anxious parsimony in great things and their still more anxious liberality in little. Such persons will practise all sorts of manoeuvres to hinder you from drinking wine at dinner, and beg you to fall heartily on the bread and butter at tea. If there is the least excuse in the season, they will have no fruit for the desert, and be the first to lament the deficiency, or to cry out, with an air of sudden recollection, "Bless me, I might have preserved some fruit, if I had thought of it." If there is no such excuse in the season, they heap the table with bad apples and pears, and take a great deal of trouble to assure you that there are no better to be had. If they must surprise you with something decent or seasonable, they are careful to have as small a quantity as possible : and whether accustomed or not to deny themselves good things in private, they contrive to make a merit of eating none of the salmon or the green peas, and forcing upon your plate the remaining spoonful. But at other times, nothing shocks them so much as the not having enough to spare what is homely, they think, must betray them at once; and therefore, with lively denunciations against people who serve up small dishes, and ardent entreaties that you will do them the favour of shewing a good appetite, they set before you the hugest and coarsest meats, complain all the time that you eat nothing, and finish the dinner with a pie that seems made for a set of paviors, and that almost requires pickaxes to get at the fruit, We say nothing of their more private anxieties of their sidelong vigilance upon butter and sugar, their fortifications of pantry and coal-cellar, their lectures upon humility in general, and the shamefulness of waste in particular, the figures which they and their family cut on ordinary occasions, or the blaze which the wife and daughters make in company, contrasted with the ragged elbows and sullen visages of those who are left at home. It is sufficient, that they are always exposing themselves to contempt, always making it worse with their excuses, and always on thorns from their anxiety to deceive or their mortified consciousness of not deceiving. And all, for what? What is the cause of this fatal disorder, which cuts up their comfort by the roots, and which they can never be brought to remedy, much less to avow? It is the salvation of a few shillings, which no more makes up for the satisfaction and the respectability which they lose by keeping them, than laying by their hats or gowns could make up for the colds which they would catch, or the ridiculous figure they would cut in the streets. Besides, it is ten to one that the shillings are not saved after all, for though bad meals may not be so heartily eaten as good, yet the saving plan in clothes, furniture, &c. which seduces them to what are called cheap shops, is found to be the most wasteful in the end; and the use of bad provisions, bad wine, bad butter, &c. is most probably revenged by a doctor's bill, which carries away all the shillings so painfully scraped off the table. Here, then, is a disorder as casily remedied as it is painful to themselves and disgusting to others; but give them a hint of its existence-insinuate the least necessity of a cure, and you only rouse the obstinacy of a self-love, which from the sufferings it persists to endure, might rather be called self-hatred. Yet supposing for an instant, that a doctor might be called in to mental as well as corporeal maladies, how entirely would he act, in the former cases, upon the principle of remedy in the latter! To the ill-tempered person he would say, Sir, your mind is subject to continual fever we must do our endeavours to make you cooler, and to this end, I must insist that you keep yourself quiet. Avoid much meat, which fills your head with vapours, and much wine, which sets your blood in a riot; and when your system is brought down a little, and you get rid of this tendency to delirium, you will no longer turn pale at sight of an ill-roasted joint, or red at every joke that is aimed at you, or grow sullen at kindness, or become enraged at one that treads on your toe, or be fretful all day for having cut yourself while shaving, or wreak your revenge upon objects that cannot resist you, or suffer a pin, a hair, an inuendo, to make you wretched for a week to come, or in short, drive away all your friends from your infirmity, lest they should catch the contagion, or suffer all sorts of annoyances when you expose yourself." To the envious person he would say, Sir or Madam, your perceptions are all disordered, you are troubled with a spleen, which turns every thing you hear, see, and feel, to a monster, or at least to something which you try to persuade yourself is a monster. Seek the society of your friends, enter heartily into their amusements, and when you hear one of them say a good thing, or play a good tune, or receive a good compliment, try all you can to enjoy it as well as the rest. They will be surprised; they will become as social with you as with others; and instead of calling their faces ugly, their gestures fautastic, and their heads empty, you will find them very well-looking, decent, and sensible people; or, if their qualities should not amount to so much, you will at least not be disgusted with their manners, or impatient at their ignorance; and above all, you will no longer be subject to that unhappy trick of fancying that in proportion as your acquaintance appear respectable, you, who are their companion, must seem ridiculous. Thus we shall remove your disorder by going up to its cause; your blood, which is inclined to become stagnant, will circulate freely from your heart; and you will shortly get rid of this intolerable oppression, which is neither more nor less than a waking nightmare."To the stingy person, the 66 |