cause of my dejection.' It is vain to tell him his sufferings are imaginary, and must be conquered by his reason, and that the shapes of horror, and the sounds of terror, which haunt and harass him by day and night, are engendered in his brain, and are the effects of a culpable indulgence in gloomy reveries. In his better moments he himself knows that it is so, but in spite of every exertion, those reveries do come upon him; and instead of receding from the gulf they open beneath his feet, he feels like a timid person standing on the verge of a precipice, irresistibly impelled to fling himself from the brink on which he totters. It is worse than useless to reason with him about the absurdity of his conduct-his temper is only irritated: it is cruel to laugh at his delusions, or to try to laugh him out of them-his misery is only increased by ridicule.

It may be very true, that, he exaggerates every feeling; but, as Dr. James Johnson has justly observed, "all his sensations are exaggerated, not by his voluntary act, but by the morbid sensibility of his nerves, which he cannot by any exertion of his mind prevent." Raillery, remonstance, the best of homilies, the gravest of lectures, do not answer here; the argument must be addressed to the disordered mind, through the medium of the stomach. A well regulated regimen, and an aro

matic aperient may do more to remove the delusion of the hypochondriac, than any thing that can be said, preached, or prescribed to him.

Indigestion is often one of the accompanying symptoms of hypochondria; but, as we have before remarked, it may be often wanting in the .. severest forms of the disorder, yet there is great reason to regard hypochondria in no other light than that of an aggravated form of dyspepsia. At all events there is no shape of this disease, as Dr. J. Johnson has observed, which is not aggravated by intemperance in diet, and not mitigated by an abstemious regimen. Burton's account of the horrors of hypochondria, is one of the most graphic of all the descriptions of its sufferings. "As the rain," saith Austin, "penetrates the stone, so does this passion of melancholy penetrate the mind. It commonly accompanies men to their graves: physicians may ease, but they cannot cure it; it may lie hid for a time, but it will return again, as violently as ever, on slight occasions as well as on casual excesses. Its humour is like Mercury's weather-beaten statue, which had once been gilt; the surface was clean and uniform, but in the chinks there was still a remnant of gold: and in the purest bodies, if once tainted by hypochondria, there will be some relics of melancholy still left, not so easily to be rooted

out. Seldom does this disease, procure death, except (which is the most grievous calamity of all) when these patients make away with themselves a thing familiar enough amongst them when they are driven to do violence to themselves to escape from present insufferable pain. They can take no rest in the night, or if they slumber, fearful dreams astonish them, their soul abhorreth all meat, and they are brought to death's door, being bound in misery and in iron. Like Job, they curse their stars, for Job was melancholy to despair, and almost to madness. They are weary of the sun and yet afraid to die, vivere nolunt, et mori nesciunt. And then, like Esop's fishes, they leap from the frying-pan into the fire, when they hope to be eased by means of physic; a miserable end to the disease when ultimately left to their fate by a jury of physicians furiously disposed; and there remains no more to such persons, if that heavenly Physician, by his grace and mercy, (whose aid alone avails,) do not heal and help them. One day of such grief as their's, is as an hundred years: it is a plague of the sense, a convulsion of the soul, an epitome of hell: and if there be a hell upon earth it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart! No bodily torture is like unto it, all other griefs are swallowed up in this great Euripus. I say of the melancholy

man, he is the cream and quintessence of human adversity. All other diseases are trifles to hypochondria; it is the pith and marrow of them all! A melancholy man is the true Prometheus, bound to Caucasus; the true Tityus, whose bowels are still devoured by a vulture."

CHAPTER XVII.

JOHNSON CONTINUED.

Our attention was some time ago called to the peculiarities of Johnson's malady, by an attack which we heard made on his failings and infirmities by one of the greatest of our living poets: and one of those literary ephemera who flutter round the light of learning.

We heard it asserted that Johnson "was far behind the intelligence of his age; that his mind was so imbued with the legends of the nursery, and the fables of superstition, that his belief extended to the visionary phantoms of both." In short, that he had neither the heavenly armour of religion, which is hope and confidence in the goodness of the Deity-nor the earthly shield of honour, which is freedom of spirit and fearlessness of death.

The minor critic, with supercilious air, spoke of the ferocious powers of the great bear of learning, the unpresentable person of the "respectable Hottentot," who had knocked down his bookseller