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THE CONVALESCENT.

A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.

question to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him understand, that things went cross-grained in the court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin,” disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of anything but how to get better.

What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing consideration!

He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only.

And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw daylight curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it? To become insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse? If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords it there; what He lies pitying himself, honing and moancaprices he acts without control! how king- ing to himself; he yearneth over himself; like he sways his pillow-tumbling, and toss- his bowels are even melted within him, to ing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-weep over himself. varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He is for ever plotting how to do some He changes sides oftener than a politician. good to himself; studying little stratagems Now he lies full length, then half-length, and artificial alleviations. obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him

not.

A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a lawsuit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this man's errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to come on yesterday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a

He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates-as of a thing apart from him-upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart.

He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths and his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejacu

lations before it as unreservedly as to his lay and acted his despotic fancies-how is it bed-post.

roduced to a common bed-room! The trimness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about it. It is made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the

To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what the callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call: and even in the lines on that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of himself as the sick man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and so carefully, for fear of rustling—is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to

morrow.

Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know anything, not to think of anything. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him: he can just endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking "Who was it?" He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty.

decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was an historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid.

Hushed are those mysterious sighs-those groans-so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage.

Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he, too, changed with everything else! Can this be he—this man of news-of chatof anecdote of everything but physic-can this be he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating party ?—Pshaw ! 'tis some old woman.

Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous-the spell that hushed the household-the desert-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers-the mute attendance-the inquiry by looks-the still softer delicacies of self-attention-the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little better-and you will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow-chair of convalescence, is a itself-world-thoughts excluded-the man a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition. world unto himself-his own theatreHow convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?

The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence chamber, where he

What a speck is he dwindled into !

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting-an

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article. In Articulo Mortis, thought I; world alike; to its laws, and to its literature. but it is something hard-and the quibble, The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the wretched as it was, relieved me. The sum- acres, which in imagination I had spread mons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to over-for the sick man swells in the sole conlink me on again to the petty businesses of templation of his single sufferings, till he life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle becomes a Tityus to himself-are wasting to call to activity, however trivial; a wholesome a span; and for the giant of self-importance, meaning from that preposterous dream of which I was so lately, you have me once self-absorption-the puffy state of sickness- again in my natural pretensions-the lean in which I confess to have lain so long, insen- and meagre figure of your insignificant sible to the magazines and monarchies, of the Essayist.

SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS.

So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,

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-did Nature to him frame,

As all things but his judgment overcame;
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below."

ness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,-never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so,—he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He The ground of the mistake is, that men, find- tames, and he clothes them with attributes ing in the raptures of the higher poetry a of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themcondition of exaltation, to which they have selves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit no parallel in their own experience, besides to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and are as true to the laws of their own nature fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams and Macbeth. Herein the great and the being awake. He is not possessed by his little wits are differenced; that if the latter subject, but has dominion over it. In the wander ever so little from nature or actual groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his existence, they lose themselves, and their native paths. He ascends the empyrean readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads visions night-mares. They do not create, the burning marl without dismay; he wins which implies shaping and consistency. Their his flight without self-loss through realms of imaginations are not active-for to be active chaos" and old night." Or if, abandoning is to call something into act and form-but himself to that severer chaos of a "human passive, as men in sick dreams. For the mind untuned," he is content awhile to be super-natural, or something super-added to mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of what we know of nature, they give you the madness) with Timon, neither is that mad-plainly non-natural. And if this were all,

and that these mental hallucinations were are at home, and upon acquainted ground discoverable only in the treatment of subjects The one turns life into a dream; the other out of nature, or transcending it, the judg- to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of ment might with some plea be pardoned if every-day occurrences. By what subtle art it ran riot, and a little wantonised: but of tracing the mental processes it is effected, even in the describing of real and every-day we are not philosophers enough to explain, life, that which is before their eyes, one of but in that wonderful episode of the cave of these lesser wits shall more deviate from Mammon, in which the Money God appears nature-show more of that inconsequence, first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a which has a natural alliance with frenzy, worker of metals, and becomes the god of all than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as the treasures of the world; and has a Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal daughter, Ambition, before whom all the to any one that is acquainted with the com- world kneels for favours-with the Hesperian mon run of Lane's novels, as they existed fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate some twenty or thirty years back,-those washing his hands vainly, but not impertiscanty intellectual viands of the whole female nently, in the same stream-that we should reading public, till a happier genius arose, and be at one moment in the cave of an old expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms, hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge whether he has not found his brain more of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his at once, with the shifting mutations of the sense of when and where more confounded, most rambling dream, and our judgment yet among the improbable events, the incoherent all the time awake, and neither able nor incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no- willing to detect the fallacy,—is a proof of characters, of some third-rate love-intrigue that hidden sanity which still guides the poet where the persons shall be a Lord Glenda- in the wildest seeming aberrations. mour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond-street-a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy-grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless stream of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive:-we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we

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It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort-but what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.

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CAPTAIN JACKSON.

AMONG the deaths in our obituary for this | suades me, that this could have been no other month, I observe with concern At his cot- in fact than my dear old friend, who some tage on the Bath road, Captain Jackson." five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement, The name and attribution are common which he was pleased to dignify with the enough; but a feeling like reproach per- appellation here used, about a mile from

Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, leavings: only he would sometimes finish the and the good turns they do us, slide out of remainder crust, to show that he wished no memory, and are recalled but by the surprise savings. of some such sad memento as that which now Wine we had none; nor, except on very lies before us! rare occasions, spirits; but the sensation of He whom I mean was a retired half-pay wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I officer, with a wife and two grown-up daugh-remember-"British beverage," he would ters, whom he maintained with the port and say! "Push about, my boys;' ""Drink to notions of gentlewomen upon that slender your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre professional allowance. Comely girls they draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements.

were too.

And was I in danger of forgetting this man ?-his cheerful suppers-the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the cottage-the anxious ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. — Althea's horn in a poor platter-the power of self-enchantment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to bounties.

We had our songs-"Why, Soldiers, why," and the "British Grenadiers”—in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme-the masters he had no-expense" which he spared to accomplish them in a science "so necessary to young women." But thenthey could not sing "without the instrument."

You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag, cold savings from the foregone meal-remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious will-the given them-the " revelling imagination of your host-the mind, the mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves were spread before you-hecatombsno end appeared to the profusion.

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It was the widow's cruse-the loaves and fishes; carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it-the stamina were left-the elemental bone still flourished, divested of its accidents.

"Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open-handed creature exclaim; "while we have, let us not want," "here is plenty left;" "want for nothing"-with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoking boards, and feast-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', he would convey the remanent rind into his own, with a merry quirk of "the nearer the bone," &c., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were verè hospitibus sacra. But of one thing or another there was always enough, and

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Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of Poverty! Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of that slender image of a voice.

We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well; had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had penned the greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the present

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