away his sorrow. In all cases it is the stomach which is the seat, cause, and origin of all. Here Grief first seizes with his paralyzing hand; here Despair hovers with his ebon wings; here too Joy first smiles, and Hope lights up her etherial torch. No man, who has eyes to see, can have been long in the world without finding a thousand proofs of our fundamental principle. Go to a dinner party, for instance, and contemplate the funereal gloom which pervades the drawing-room; your host and hostess salute you in a state of anxious suspense; the guests drop in and look at the clock, one after another, stiff, formal, and ceremonious; and hover about rubbing their hands, and looking at the pictures if there are any,—into the fire or out at the windows, if there are not. A few words are dropped about the news; the weather of the day, the week, and the season is tortured into every possible shape. Some mercurial fellow, perhaps, who has fortified himself with a one o'clock lunch, rattles away for a few moments, as if he were among men with stomachs as comfortable as his own; he might as well talk to statues. He is chilled, after a few efforts, down to the zero of the atmosphere in which he finds himself. A dead silence succeeds to the few efforts the conversation has made to keep its head above water. A black head pops in at the sidedoor; every face brightens; but no-it is some whispered message of distress from Betty cook. Suspense becomes impatience, impatience agony. The folding doors recede, and the scene changes. The countenance expands, and indicates that calm serenity of expectation which pervades the stomachic region. Now is the "sober certainty of waking bliss; "—and who, after the silent period of enjoyment which follows, would recognise, in the noisy, good-natured, satisfied party at the table, the impatient, sullen, and frigid group which hovered around the drawing-room? Many a man, as well as myself, has been in the course of his life, by some mysterious dispensation of fate, caught at a tea-party alone amidst a circle of ladies. He only who has experienced, can conceive of the horrors of this position. Every faculty is tied up, every limb paralyzed, the tongue refuses to obey its office, as if he were enclosed within the magic ring of a wizard. Awkward whispers; distant nods; giggles half forced, half smothered; looks oblique and direct, half inviting and half repelling, at the forlorn biped, as if he were some strange animal imprisoned among them, form the sum total of the attractions of this female community. But how does the vapour of the fascinating decoction, when it fills the room, warm and animate all. Wit, wisdom, and scandal go round with the tea, and as its potent influence extends, the company take up their own characters and take down their neighbours'. Even the poor masculine animal, who has strayed among them, feels the benefit of its enchantment; cold looks and frigid regards melt before it; the chain is taken from his spirit, the spell from his tongue; he begins to feel his true dignity and importance; and he stands among them, as he is, the admiration of the sex,— dulce decus columenque. Every man's spirits vary at different hours of the day. Sometimes he is buoyant and elastic; again gloomy and disconsolate. The same event which, at one moment, sinks him in despair, at another, fills him with hope; the same prospect which seems now overcast with clouds, and ready to be visited with storms, at a more propitious period is brilliant with sunshine, and tells of nothing but peace and gladness. Yet the things are the same; "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus," or rather, it is in our stomachs, which are our better parts. If a man tells you he has something lying heavy upon his mind, you may be sure he has something lying heavy on his stomach. If he complains of an empty purse, or a failing trade, it is next to certain that he has been disappointed of his dinner. Evil is not evil upon a full stomach; good is not good upon an empty one. Suppose a man to wake up on a cold wintry morning, hurry on his clothes, and run out upon his business before breakfast. The cold shrinks him up like a dried apple-john; it penetrates to his very marrow. He stalks along feeling like a petrifaction. The streets, across which the long shadows of the houses stretch, are dark and gloomy. Every body looks blue, miserable, and starved. His counting-room or his shop is a mere tomb; his fire cannot be kindled. He curses Lehigh coal, and the lying demon or more lying advertisement, which seduced him into the use of it. His ink is frozen, and his pen, when in a frenzy he has wrested it from the standish, is marred and spoilt. He opens his books. His eye dwells despairingly upon bad debts, unprofitable voyages, unlucky speculations, his mind upon embarrassment, failure, starvation. He walks home with his hands in his breeches pockets, muttering anathemas against the horrid climate, and the more horrid state of business, ruminating over his falling fortunes, and wondering what there is in this world to live for. A famished wife, and a group of hungry children await his arrival. The sight goes cold to his very heart. How are so many mouths to be filled for so many years. This is the crisis. A smoking breakfast comes in; and during its kindly operation upon the stomach, the whole system enjoys sympathetical delight. He goes out a new man; his flesh has extended and become warm, his joints supple, his spirits elastic. The world looks gay about him. The brilliancy of a winter's prospect is more than a balance for its cold. He wonders how he could ever be discontented. The bright fire greets him like a kind friend. He sits down to his business warm, comfortable, and happy, invoking blessings on Mount Carbon and the Schuylkill Navigation Company, when he owes all to his breakfast. We are apt to attribute to a malevolence of disposition, to ill humour and a bad temper a thousand actions which are truly owing to a depraved state of that important part, the stomach. You see some men, who always meet you with a smile, shake the extended hand, crack the ready joke, and raise the reviving laugh. These are your men of easy digestion; who eat their five meals a day, and concoct them all; whose gastric liquor is the universal menstruum, the true elixir vitæ, which breaks down before it all those heterogeneous substances, upon which, in civilized society, we are condemned to feed, and converts them into real essential vitality. But look at their opposite; the man whose face is contracted by anxiety and wrinkled by care; who seldom smiles, never laughs, and has no more conception of a joke than of a sixth sense; who greets you like an icicle, scarcely touches your proffered hand with his cold and clayey fingers, damns the weather whatever it is, the news, or the no news, the state of business and of politics. This is your man of uneasy digestion; whose stomach, like the apartments of a slovenly housewife, which are never cleared out, swept, and set in order after the departure of one set of guests, in season for the reception of another, is one continued scene of broil and fermentation, of contention between fat and lean, boiled and roast, solid and liquid, animal and vegetable. Luncheon crowds hard upon the tardy operations of breakfast, and dinner treads so close upon the heels of luncheon, that tea and supper come on before they have fairly settled the order of precedence; and the fortunate period of rest which night affords, hardly suffices for their departure, amid the torments of incubus, their duty but half performed. Study then, not the signs of the times, but the signs of the stomach, if you would attain a thorough knowledge of the world. It is thus alone, that you can possess yourself of the key to men's characters, and learn how to approach them when you wish to obtain your ends. Some must be taken fasting, and some feasting; others during the task of digestion; others again when it has been completed. One man, before dinner, is as keen as a razor, and will shave you, close as a new bank; after it, he is a different being, and the merest tyro can beat him at a bargain. Another can only trade upon a full belly. Beef and mutton are as necessary to the transaction of his affairs as water to a steam-boiler. He who would get cannily along with his fellow sufferers of the human species must consider their digestion. If a fair lady, who I have had reason to hope regarded me with eyes of favour, becomes capricious, slights my vows, heeds not my protestations, scorns my company, or, the unkindest cut of all, cuts me in Cornhill, I never, like other sturdy bachelors, fall to cursing the instability of the sex, the fickleness of woman, and swell the gale with sighs and the ocean with tears. I lament the state of her stomach, wish her a doctor, and wait for a change. Peter Splenetic, one of the best friends I have in the world, is a man of the most wayward digestion possible. If I see Peter during one of your cold, easterly storms in the smiling month of May, I no more think of saluting him, than I should one of the goggle-eyed wax gentry that figure in Greenwood's Museum. He minds you no more than a post, but stares you in the face as you go by him, with such an unknowing and dyspeptic expression of countenance, as makes your stomach ache. But if you come in his way in a fine bracing atmosphere, there is not a more true, genuine, laudable gripe to be had, than he gives you by the hand. Peter is one of the best equestrians in the county of Suffolk; but set him on a horse when his stomach is down at zero, and he cuts a figure equal to the Flying Phenomena at the Circus. With one hand on the bridle, the other grasping, with all its might, his weaker region, he gallops along at full speed, like a man after a doctor or before a sheriff, greatly disturbing all peaceable men, women, and children, who may chance to cross his path. At half after three o'clock in the afternoon, he may generally be seen on the way to the Neck, South Boston Bridge, the Corporation, or some other roomy place, in all the horrors of digestion. He strides by you like an ostrich, stemming and buffetting the stream of passengers through which he has to make his way, to the great excitement of those leisurely individuals who make a conscience of occupying two-thirds of our narrow side-walks, as they drift elegantly along at the rate of a mile an hour. Such fellows have I seen eye him indignantly from the gutter, into which a contact with his sturdy person has forced them reluctantly to step, whilst he, all unconscious of the inconvenience they had sustained, kept on the even tenor of his way. An hour and a half afterwards, if you happen to be walking in his wonted track, he comes up unexpectedly behind you, takes you by the arm, wishes he could see you oftener, goes home with you, takes a cigar, chats, jokes, and laughs, to your complete conviction, that Peter digesting and Peter having digested, are two very different persons. "Boston folks are full of notions," is a saying which time and truth have made proverbial. It is equally true, and almost as notorious, that Boston folks are addicted to dyspepsia. What a satisfactory cause is thus suggested for that character which has been cast as a reproach upon this ancient place! Notions are the legitimate offspring of indigestion. A dyspeptical man is always full of them, why not a dyspeptical community also? Churches of superb and everlasting granite, with a wooden steeple or a fence of unplaned boards, jammed in, perhaps, as if by beetle and wedge, between stables, taverns, tippling-houses, and muddy streets; a capitol of painted brick; a market spacious, splendid, and durable, but all on one side;-these are some of the fruits of this tremendous disorder. It is its prevalence, which renders the otherwise crafty citizens of the Emporium so prone to running after strangers of distinction, foreigners with titles, mountebanks, merryandrews, tragedians, and pickpockets; making much of swindlers and charlatans, and neglecting modest men of merit. In fine, it was an epidemic state of stomach in the community, during the prevalence of which we were left to overset the old municipal order of things, under which we had eaten and drunk, been born, married, and buried for so many years, and bring into existence the new thing called "city," like a pert, young, upstart cockney, usurping the place and honours of an older and a better. Having proved to my own satisfaction, and no doubt to that of my readers also, the immense influence exerted by the stomach upon our characters and fortunes; it is needless, like the old sermon writers, to enter upon a dry and formal improvement of our discourse. It must be clear to every one how much it is the part of wisdom and discretion to keep in a state of good humour, an organ capable of doing so much hurt and so much good. Let him only recollect, that it is the main spring of a machine, which, with proper usage is to keep in motion for threescore years and ten; that he is to wind it up, and regulate it as a man does his watch, and not play with it like a boy. Let him do this, and this corporeal system, on whose face hours, months, and years become marked, will keep time till eternity. It is in vain that you seek for quiet, content, and composure in the groves of philosophy, or for happiness in the haunts of pleasure, if you neglect the state of the stomach. This will be found the fundamental principle of all true philosophy, the true secret of the " mens sana in corpore sano." ORIGINAL POETRY. A VISION. I have been haunted by an awful dream- |