But weak treatment may frighten the intelligert. A kind person, for instance, in a fit of melancholy, may confess that he feels an inclination to do some desperate or even cruel thing. This is often treated at once as madness, instead of an excess of the kind just mentioned; and the person seeing he is thought out of his wits, begins to think himself so, and at last acts as if he were. This is a lamentable evil; but it does not stop here. The children or other relatives of the person may become victims to the mistake. They think there is madness, as the phrase is, "in the family ;" and so whenever they feel ill, or meet with a misfortune, the thought will prey upon their minds; and this may lead to catastrophes, with which they have really no more to do than any other sick or unfortunate people. How many persons have committed an extravagance in a brain fever, or undergone hallucinations of mind in consequence of getting an ague, or taking opium, or fifty other causes; and yet the moment the least wandering of mind is observed in them, others become frightened; their fright is manifested beyond all necessity; and the patients and their family must suffer for it. They seem to think that no disorder can properly be held a true Christian sickness, and fit for charitable interpretation, but where the patient has gone regularly to bed, and had curtains, and caudlecups, and nurses about him, like a well-behaved respectable sick gentleman. But this state of things implies muscular weakness, or weakness of that sort which renders the bodily action feeble. Now, in nervous disorders, the muscular action may be as strong as ever; and people may reasonably be allowed a world of illness, sitting in their chairs, or even walking or running.

These mistaken pronouncers upon disease ought to be told, that when they are thus unwarrantably frightened, they are partaking of the very essence of what they misapprehend; for it is fear, in all its various degrees and modifications, which is at the bottom of nervousness and melancholy; not fear in its ordinary sense, as opposed to 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 pain

ful and worrying thought. Now this suffering is invariably 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 inquire; but the mind is sometimes afraid of acknow. ledging its 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 knowledge. 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 black 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 anything 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 better knowledge, into so vulgar an error. There are very few instances of insane poets, or of insane great understandings of any sort. Bacon, Milton, Newton, Shaks peare, 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 derangement 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 humors. He him. self 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 boils and blisters. This was a violent effort of nature to help and purify the current of his blood,-the main object in all such cases. Dr. Johnson, who was subject to mists of melancholy, used to fancy he should go mad; but he never did.

Exercise, conversation, cheerful 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 showed 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 may 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.

CHAPTER XV.

Mists and Fogs.

FOGs and mists, being nothing but vapors which the cold air will not suffer to evaporate, must sometimes 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 may 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. Its inhabitants walk through the same airy heaps which at other times float 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 shopwindows 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 mass, 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 pas