medical advisers "that they might throw physic to his dogs, ! who, however, though they dealt in bark [the archbishop was an inveterate punster], were better judges than to drink it." His insuperable repugnance to medicine is attributed in part to "a charlatanical course of drastic drugging" to which he was subjected soon after his arrival in Ireland. Ever after this experience he is said to have limited his faith in medicine. to the homoeopathic system. The last four weeks of his life were "one long torment," the pains of which might have been allayed by a "judicious administration of anodynes and opiates; but Dr. Whately, like Fox and O'Connell, refused to swallow drugs." Urgent friends were answered with the second-hand answer, that their advice was like their physic, more agreeable to give than take.* The only medical maxim, perhaps, of which that master of maxims would have unconditionally approved, might be that of the School of Health at Salerno, which bids him that is in need of doctors, take for doctors these three eligibles-a cheerful mind, relaxation from toil, and temperate diet: "Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant Hæc tria; mens hilaris, requies, moderata diæta." If doctors are addicted to dog Latin, it is only in keeping with the destiny of their drugs, in the case at least of those whose maxim is Macbeth's, to throw physic to the dogs. Scarcely have the consulting physicians marched off from Mr. Simpkin Barnard's bedroom, in Anstey's New Bath Guide, "each his cane at his nose," when Jenny comes in, who has heard all their prose, and she'll teach them, she vows, at their next consultation, to come and take fees for the good of the nation, (for all their talk has been of politics). So, "she seized all the stuff that the doctor had sent, * Anecdotal Memoirs of Archbishop Whately, vol. ii., pp. 259, 265. His wig had the luck a cathartic to meet, And squash went the gallipot under his feet. She said 'twas a shame I should swallow such stuff, When my bowels were weak, and the physic so rough." Mr. Gill, the then "eminent Cook at Bath," was more to Jenny's mind, and she would have sided with the sweet singer, sweet-toothed one at least, who invidiously compared the modes and merits respectively of Galen and of Gill: "Your spirits and your blood to stir, old Galen gives a pill ; § ΠΙ. METAPHYSICAL MALADY AND PHYSICAL ART. Macbeth, Act v., Sc. 3. THE Doctor had already declared Lady Macbeth's disease to be beyond his practice, when questioned by her husband, "How does your patient, Doctor?" Not so sick, is the reply, as troubled with thick-coming fancies, that keep her from her rest; a reply that at once stirs Macbeth to the wistful utterance, "Cure her of that,"—and to the instantly ensuing query, Doctor. "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain; And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Therein the patient Must minister to himself." More needs she the divine than the physician, the latter had said of the sleep-walking lady. And now if Macbeth be such a patient as he describes, to himself must that patient minister: he, the physician, can not minister to a mind so diseased. Algazzāli, the Light of Islam and Pillar of the Mosque, when stricken by that strange disease which involved loss of voice as well as loss of appetite, and entire prostration of physical energies, was declared by physicians to be beyond hope of recovery, "unless he could shake off the sadness which depressed him." Johnson seems to have approved and admired the resolve of Dr. Nichols never to attend a patient, whatever his distemper might be, if his mind was not at ease; for he believed that no medicines would be of any avail to one thus disquieted. As Mr. Kennedy tells his wife in Phineas Finn, “I can see now what it is that makes your head ache. It is not the stomach. You are quite right there.-Dr. Macnuthrie is a learned man, but I doubt whether he can do anything for such a malady." "You are quite quite right, Robert; he can do nothing." "It is a malady you must cure for yourself, Laura." Perhaps the lady, if addicted to Latin, might have applied with a note of admiration what Pamphilus in the Andria utters with a note of interrogation, Cum egomet possim in hac re medicari mihi! Pope's imitation of Horace makes easy work of metaphysical malady as compared with physical: "The case is easier in the mind's disease; There all men may be cured whene'er they please." There is a chapter in Mr. John Stuart Mill's Autobiography called "A Crisis in my Mental History," some pages of which relate to the deep dejection which overcame him at the period in question, "a grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear," for which he sought no relief by speaking to others of what he felt. If he had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding his griefs a necessity, he should not, he says, have been in the condition described. He felt, too, that his was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress: there was nothing in it to attract sympathy. "Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts." But there was no one, it seems, on whom the sufferer could build the faintest hope of such assistance-not a friend, at that time, to whom he had any hope of making his condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelligible to himself; and the more he dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.* Dr. Vincent shakes his head after his puzzled examination of Margaret in the story of Henry Dunbar, and tells her friends, "It is a case in which my services can be of very little avail the young lady is suffering from some mental uneasiness which she refuses to communicate "--and there an end. What doctor can minister to such a disease? whose physic avail to cope with such metaphysics? As Spenser's hermit has it, "In vaine of me ye hope for remedie, And I likewise in vaine do salves to you applie. For in yourselfe your onely helpe doth lie, To heale yourselfe, and must proceed alone Who can cure him that will be cured of none?" In the opening stanza of another canto of his great poem Spenser starts the question, "What equall torment to the griefe of mind, And pyning anguish hid in gentle hart, That inly feeds itself with thoughts unkind, And nourisheth her own consuming smart? What medicine can any leaches art Yield such a sore, that doth her grievance hide, As Roger Chillingworth tells a too reticent patient, the heart of whose mystery he would pluck out, he to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, * "In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it, and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state; but the idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner."-Autobiography of J. S. Mill, p. 140. but half the evil which he is called upon to cure a bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. "Thus, a sickness, a sore place, in your spirit, hath its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily evil? How may this be, unless you first lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?” Mr. Merdle's skilled physician has this to say of him, that he can find nothing the matter with Mr. Merdle-that he has the constitution of a rhinoceros, the digestion of an ostrich, and the concentration of an oyster-that as to nerves he is about as invulnerable as Achilles. "How such a man should suppose himself unwell without reason, you may think strange. But I have found nothing the matter with him. He may have some deep-seated recondite complaint. I can't say. I only say, that at present I have not found. it out." An equally skilled physician of Lord Lytton's picturing, from the life,-described as being, what every great physician should be, a profound philosopher, though with a familiar ease of manner, and a light offhand vein of talk, which made the philosophy less sensible to the taste than any other ingredient in his pharmacopoeia,— examines Gentleman Waife all over, alone, sounds the old man's vital organs with ear and with stethoscope, talks to him now on his feelings, now on the news of the day, and then steps out to tell his friend, "Something on the heart; I can't get at it; perhaps you can. Take off that something, and the springs will react, and my patient will soon recover." It is the same doctor that, later in the story, is called in to Lady Montfort, and pronounces hers to be a case in which physicians can be of very little use: there is something on the mind which his prescriptions fail to reach; worry of some sort decidedly worry. And unless she herself can either cure that, or will make head against it, worry may bring to an abruptly fatal issue, in her case, a good chronic silent grief of some years' standing.-At the bride of Lammermoor's flighty levity, after the dreadful scene at the castle, |