SIR, It is now nearly a year since some conversation passed between us on the subject of the Hypochondria. It was about the time when the "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" appeared in your Magazine; and it was while I was descanting on the eloquence of the writer, I believe, and expressing to you how similar to his had been my own sensations, that I, in a manner, engaged to render you some account of myself. I now perform my pro

mise.

The class of persons to whom this paper is directed is much more numerous even than that of the eaters of opium. It involves, in fact, the opium eater, as well as the student, the invalid, the glutton, the drinker, the gamester, and others. They are all, at one time or another, hypochondriacs. I address myself also to those who have never suffered. While it is yet time, let them pass the cup from their lips; let them extinguish their midnight lamps, for darkness is then better than light. Let their course be like the sun's, steady, bright, and rejoicing. The mind, like the body, may be strained till it cracks. Therefore, between each draught of learning or wine, let quiet and rest intervene. No man ever "wasted the midnight oil" to a great degree, without wasting also his own spirit, and diminishing his capacity for knowledge.

The sin of your "Opium Eater" is, that he does not prescribe a remedy for the disease. He does not tell you what measures he tried, and what failed; but he dresses up his pleasures and his pains in diction so gorgeous and alluring, that he really almost makes us wish to become acquainted with both. He is, in short, too eloquent, too interesting. His motives were, I have no doubt, entirely excellent; yet I do not think that he has diminished the number of opium eaters. For me, it is not

material, perhaps, that I should expose to you my reasons for entering into a somewhat painful detail. If I should interest you, or rouse the attention of any of your readers to themselves, it will be sufficient. Perhaps I may be influenced by some secret spring moving me to do good

perhaps by the poor vanity of seeing myself in print-perhaps I sigh to kill a few tedious hours ;-or am a tyro aiming at distinction. No matter. There is more to be learned from a man's weakness than from his strength. Some of mine I shall unveil to you (for what I write is true), and you will therefore, I am sure, spare me (and yourself) the fruitless trouble of too strict an inquisition.

I do not, like your Opium Eater, profess myself a philosopher; yet İ could, perhaps, justify my claim to the title through etymology, for I am a lover of wisdom and intellect, although my past life, as well as this present writing, may show how little of either has fallen upon myself.-Certainly the "Confessions" have much eloquence. When I read them I was in a moment struck by the coincidence between the writer's sensations and my own. I said, "I have felt this," and, "This has come upon me, in dusk, in darkness"—" Thus have I been shaken by terrors, and a vague remorse."-" Upon my head, too, have these dreams descended, populous, and dazzling, and bright," rivalling

Egypt, when she with Assyria strove
In wealth and luxury.

Alas! that these should be the solitary gifts of sickness!-Alas! that we, poor slaves of a cheating fancy, should be wretched in the broad day, and at night should taste nothing beyond the unwholesome bounties of sleep!

We are told of persons being "nervous," when their hands shake after a midnight debauch. We hear

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of young gentlemen being "nervous at a crowd or a boxing match;-and of ladies being "a little nervous" after the luxury of green tea. My case is different from all these. I am what the world calls "A Hypochondriac," that is to say, I am an invalid, nervous, and sensitive, full of strange and dim apprehensions: my memory is replete with troubles: my frame is emaciated: my imagination is sick and haunted: my hopes are gloomy; and my fears-they are countless and terrible beyond all telling. I have done little to deserve all this. I have been temperate, unadventurous: I have, indeed, been fond of books, but I have never tempted the extreme rigour of the seasons, nor the mad joys of drinking, nor gaming, nor politics, nor war: yet I am a sufferer as great as though I had explored the pole, or traversed the burning desarts of the line; as though I had got fame and unhealing wounds in mighty battles, or run riot with the bacchanal and lavished my soul on wine.

-Of all diseases, chronic or acute, there is none to be compared to this. Every man will, of course, insist that his own peculiar malady is the most heinous, and he the most exemplary of sufferers. I have heard maintained as worse-the head-ache, tooth-ache, fever, dislocation, rheumatism, asthma:-I have had them all, and deny the assertions. Taken with its huge train of evils, which besiege and vanquish the body and mind at once, there is nothing (that I know of) which at all approaches the terrible "PASSIO HYPOCHONDRIACA." It is the curse of the poet,of the wit;-it is the great tax upon intellect, the bar to prosperity and renown. Other ills come and pass away they have their paroxysms, their minutes or hours of tyranny, and vanish like shadows or empty dreams. But this is with you for ever. The phantom of fear is always about you. You feel it in the day at every turn; and at night you see it, illuminated and made horrible in a million fantastic shapes. Like the hag of the merchant Abudah, it comes for ever with the night, in one shape or another,devil, or giant, or hideous chimera ;

or it is an earthquake, or a fiery flood,-or a serpent twining you in its loathsome folds,—or it sits on your heart like an incubus, and presses you down to ruin.

Oh! that I had a painter's power! What Circes have I seen!-what Bacchantes,-what women of the sky and of the deep! I have heard the song of the Sirens!! I have been lashed by the snakes, and heard the howling of the Furies. I have trod the middle air, and ridden with the sun, and felt the shadow of the Valley of Death. There is nothing, however high,— -no vision of all that is impossible or sublime, that is not familiar to me.-Battles, and pomps, and shows:-the marriages of bright creatures, whose beauty has dazzled and made pale Olympus: the crownings of kings-of Gods :-shouts, and dyings, and moaning music, such as the earth never heard.--I have seen realized the splendid projects of Belus, and beheld Babylon in all its glory.-İ have walked in cities whose towers have touched the stars, among pillars and obelisks of gold and chrysolite. The door of adamant and brass (where Satan and his frightful progeny once talked) has turned upon me, and imprisoned me. I have been barred from all access or return to earth-or heaven-or the grave.— But I must not tell all my dreaming tales beforehand. The rest must come in its place.

The hypochondria-(how impressively is it called," the Passio Hy-. pochondriaca!")—has been said to be the disease of the learned; and, in truth, it seldom descends to objects altogether unintellectual. Burton has all kinds of melancholy on record, and Mandeville has written a book upon it. Neither of them, however, has, that I remember, laid down a plan for the removal of the disease. Mandeville, indeed, who was a physician-(not that man who was celebrated for a certain unlimited indulgence in-metaphor, or some other figure of speech) tells us what remedies failed, and this is doing something towards bettering our unfortunate class. And Burton (in his index, at least) professes to tell, I believe, why melancholy men are witty; but he does not do this. The fact is,

that men of wit are melancholy, and melancholy is the consequence and not the cause. It is the collapse of the spirit, which, in the proportion that it is bright in its exertion, is, perhaps, dull in its decline. It is the abyss into which the soaring imagination falls, the turbulent Icarian water. Thinking is bad for the body, whatever it may be for the soul. It is wonderful what quick and violent sympathy there exists between the stomach and the brain. I have felt (when in bad health) an instantaneous sickness from trying to make out a position, or recollect a fact. And, vice versa, I have turned dizzy and blind in a moment, from the effect of a spasm on the organs of digestion. Thus the head operates on the stomach, and the stomach on the nerves; and so it is that our laughing is turned to tears, and the honey of the world is mixed with gall: our very jests are bitter, and our mirth has a sadness in it that seems to mock its

name.

Of what nature my melancholy was, or whether its cause was congenite,' or adventitious,' I will not stop to inquire. I leave it to the learned in Burton. Like your friend Elia (oh! that delightful Elia!) I had early some troubles from "nightfears;" but I do not think that in my maturer boyhood I had any reason to complain of the devil or witches having instigated their minor imps against me: perhaps however, unfelt, they may have left the impression of their thumbs on my brain; and hence those legions of shapes and shadows may have sprung, which afterwards beset it. Indeed one figure, of that black origin, certainly visited me. This was about the time I became a student, and sat up o'nights, and drank wine to inspire me in the evening, and coffee afterwards to keep me awake. It was then that I first read the learned "Anatomy," and made acquaintance with some of the great names which throw lustre on the book. One personage, as I have said, was my constant visitor for a time. He was a crowned head (but not anointed)—his power

did not consist in armies, nor his wealth in gold or lands; yet his domain was large. His sceptre lay heavy neither on Europe, nor Asia, nor Africa, nor America, but it stretched and tyrannized over the whole human race. How I had earned his visits I never knew; but he often, and once all his brothers, came upon me. All the princes of the nine tribes of hell saw me as I slept, and I saw them. There was Beelzebub, the false oracle-Apollo Pythius, the slanderer-the mischievous Belial, and the revengeful Asmodeus. Then came "with a figure like an angel" the cozener Satan, and Meresin, in his hand bearing plague and famine :-after them stalked along Diabolos, who drives men to despair; and with him Mammon the tempter; and, last of all, shot by on his fiery steed my visitor, the prince and the destroyer ABADDON. Of him I shall speak hereafter.

It is now time to finish this desultory account with something like a regular detail. As I suffered first from melancholy when at school, I will there begin my story, And run it through, e'en from my boyish days.

-I was educated at one of our great public schools; and I could enumerate among my contemporaries some of the most distinguished persons of this age. I will not state whether the place be Eton, or Harrow, Westminster, or Winchester, &c.-inasmuch as I disapprove of public schools altogether. There is no necessity there for industry, for all is verbally explained; and there is no excitement to excellence, for there is no rivalry, and little reward. Dull or clever, you perform your journey at an easy pace, and you neither pass, nor are passed by others. When I first went to a good Latin scholar; but I did not know the Greek characters, nor could I make "nonsense verses," so I was thrown into one of the lowest forms of the school, among children to whom syntax was as obscure as the Cabala, and prosody a book her

I was

metically sealed. I remained at this school about four years, and then left it, with less Latin but with more worldly wisdom than I entered it. Oh! a public school is the place to dash the bloom off a young boy's mind. The marvel and the mystery of the coming world are there laid open to him. He mates with the first in the land, and learns contempt for every thing but station and power -and yet not altogether so: he is taught to respect courage, and to fight his way to distinction. I do not complain of that. Even I, amidst all my nervousness and illness, have some veneration for "the ring;" though I think that there are fairer kinds of renown, and greener laurels than are to be earned even there. But with "the many" the time that is passed at a public school is a reign of vanity. The duke, and the lord, and the common man's son, stand all on one broad level. This is well,-while it lasts: but the charm is broken when school-days are over, and he of "the many" is tossed from his elevation, and left to mingle with the class which he has almost learned to despise.

It was at that the impres sion of melancholy was first made upon me. It was not yet a disease, but came, and presently passed away; and Hope grew again as much my friend (or foe) as she was to others of brighter prospects. For my melancholy, it was pressed on me by circumstances. I was the son of a man of small fortune. He was rather a stern parent-to me; and I early imbibed the notion that he did not love me. This made me sad: the holidays (those bright hours) became a blank, and at school I wandered about alone, by rivers, and ponds, and lanes, and lonely places. The thought of drowning myself came upon me again and again. It is true that it left me, but it left also the idea familiar on my mind and that, undoubtedly, weighed down in some degree the spring and buoyancy of my youth.

Well, I left -, and some hundreds of associates, and went to a village in the west of England where I was without even one. Here I had to unlearn many prejudices and to acquire new tastes, if I wished for happiness or comfort.

With (I cannot help thinking it) some good points, I was as self-important and obstinate as boys of sixteen or seventeen generally are. I was in no wise remarkable. My stock of Greek and Latin was sufficiently portable. It did not weigh down my faculties, nor oppress my manner. I had hope enough to incline me to any new pursuit. The law was fixed upon, and accordingly I began to study. The introductory essay of Blackstone is an elegant piece of writing, and satisfied me,-that is to say, it did not deter me from proceeding. But the law itself, however recommended by a strenuous style, is a dull and bitter draught. The learning may be insinuated in elegant phrases, as medicine is given to the cheated child, hidden in jellies or sugar; but the true taste will be found out at last. Justice may be fine at a distance, or in the abstract, but on a close inspection of her features she is dry and repelling. Accordingly, I puzzled myself no more for some time with law, but betook me to the reading of romance and poetry. This was quite another matter; and I thrived in proportion to my industry. I had always a love for the pathetic and the marvellous. When a mere child I had been indulged with access to the book-closet of an old relation, and there it was that I picked up a taste for reading. In that closet were-the Bible, and the History of England (both with cuts; I learned, in fact, the history from those prints), The Life of Christ (Fleetwood's, I believe), Don Quixote, Lazarillo de Tormes, the Pilgrim's Progress, the plays of Shakspeare, Hervey's Meditations (carefully covered and much used!), Humphry Clinker, the Man of Feeling, Pamela, and some others;-precious tomes, but all deserted by their venerable possessor, except Hervey and the holier volumes. There was another book also, of which I am somewhat loth to speak, it was Milton's Paradise Lost-done into prose! Oh! that such" doings” should be allowed to the mercenary writer or bookseller. It is a piracy on the fame of the dead,-a slander and a sacrilege. It is worse than the Family Shakspeare!

But to return:-For upwards of a year I toiled on without a compa

nion. I was dispirited and stupid enough, I dare say. Luckily the friend in whose house I lived was a clever and really excellent man. He did not thwart my follies, nor did he encourage them; but he let the humours have room to thrive or die, leading, or tolerating, or checking them, as occasion required. I owe him much for his gentle guardianship. With that assistance I have learned, in the course of time, to keep some of them down myself. But my friend felt that law and solitude must be irksome to one so young as I; and accordingly, in about a year after my arrival at C- —, I found my sitting-room shared by another. He was directly the reverse of myself, and in most respects better. If H— should read this, he will smile when I say that he was somewhat reserved and cold, and that his enthusiasm, even in matters of study or amusement, seldom sprang from impulse. His good qualities, however, far more than compensated for those errors of constitution. He had great rectitude, and much delicacy,-firmness, and activity of purpose: he followed principle for its own sake, as much as for the pleasure it gave him, and this I have known but in few. It is the love of a good name, or the fear of a bad one, that impels too many in the pursuit of what is right. É and I lived together for three years without ever having had a quarrel. I envied him his assiduity. Sometimes (I take shame to myself) I almost scorned his unremitting and regular study; but he still kept on, heedless of my folly, and of all, except what he considered to be "the right." I, on the other hand, indolent, self-willed, and careless of consequences, floated along on the tide of my own inclinations. I fed on the trash which the library of a country town provides. I revelled in mysteries, I banqueted on poetry, and (like the pupil of the learned Mr. Surrebutter) I soiled and spoiled many a virgin quire of foolscap, without either object or remorse. I look back to those misspent days-oh! and to years gone and irrecoverable; and if I have, in some measure, emancipated myself from the thrall of folly, or the tyranny of my nature, the satisfaction which I have earned is not unmixed, or without its bitter.

Three years having past, I became an inhabitant of London. I left my friend H. to read away another year in the obscure town of C—, and set off with a joyful spirit for our great metropolis. London was familiar to me, and therefore it was not with all the immoderate joy of a first visit that I saw it. Nevertheless I was not without my emotion. I beheld its parks, and proud squares, and busy streets, and contemplated it as the arena on which I was to combat and build up my towering fortunes. I coveted wealth and distinction, not for their own sakes so much as for the power which I saw they brought.

I read of illustrious men, the founders of a great name, who sprang by their own efforts from the obscurity in which they were born. I read of artists, poets, and painters, the gleam of whose renown had shot through the mists of three thousand years, and was dazzling still. I read Shakspeare and Milton, (not in prose) and sighed, and envied, and determined. I hazarded a rhyme,—it was bad: another, and another;-they were worse and I gave up the contest. I have since found that it is something to be second or even twentieth to Shakspeare or Milton: but at that time I did not comprehend the gradations of excellence.-The law now opened itself upon my imagination; and Justice, solemn and sublime, stood before me, with the sword and the balance. I saw through vistas of counsellors, eminent talkers, wigged, busy, and industrious, up to the sanctum of equity, the throne of jurisprudence, the (it sounds like a descent)-the woolsack! It seemed but a step. A little walking on a green path, and lo! I was there. There was no doubting in such a case: so with Blackstone, and Fonblanque, and my Lord Coke (I hate him for his treatment of Bacon) I began my pleasant pilgrimage to the temple of Fame. For a year and an half I read intensely; and had my memory been as good as my other faculties, I should have been tolerably conversant with one branch of law even at this present sitting. But that year of study was my bane. I read long and late (and under some disadvantage), and my frame began to shake, and my spirits sank, in the ardour of this new pursuit.