nately, a set of phrases and epithets, which if we reflected upon what we talked, would be of infinite service to us in the treat, ment of ourselves; but it is the fate of good phrases, as well as good things, to share the odium of common-place in proportion as their utility and popular use have borne testimony to their merits; and the common language of society, made up of all sorts of profound inferences and combinations, would present to a being of a superior nature, a curious instance of a whole race of rational animals talking like philosophers and thinking like fools. Every one is familiar with the epithets which mind fur. nishes to body, and body furnishes to mind. Such and such a person is said to have a strong intellect, his mind is well inform. ed, that is, well shaped or fashioned, his apprehension has a fine tact or touch—he is a man of taste, a man of sound thinking, a man of parts: then, at the same time, his figure is graceful, his gestures are easy and unaffected, he has an intelligent eye, a live. ly smile, a decided but amiable countenance. Cowley, who suffers no such analogies to escape him, handles this sympathy of mind and body with great elegance, and carries it just as far as it will bear a great piece of moderation with him. Speaking of a love. ly female, he says, Her pure and eloquent blood Shone in her skin, and so distinctly wrought, Accordingly if the person above-mentioned falls sick, if his smile becomes less lively, and his countenance less animated,—if the body in short loses it's accustomed powers, the remedy is immediately suggested by the mind; we must go up to the cause of the disorder; in doing away the cause we do away the effect; and this is the common maxim of physicians. But here the analogy ceases, or rather the practical application of it. In spite of our common phrases of strong mind and weak mind, of sound mind and diseased mind, people forget that the principle of bodily cure is equally that of mental; it is true, they acknow ledge it in their common talk, but it is without thinking; their philosophers have made a maxim of it, but their philosophers themselves have neglected it; and while every body looks to the cause of his bodily ailments, or calls in the physician, or thanks his friend for giving him advice upon it, the commonest mental infirmity is suffered to encrease without notice; the clergyman, who is the constituted doctor on these occasions, would think you mad to apply to him on the subject; and the friend who should advise you to think seriously of the cause of it, would stand a good chance of being turned out of the house. A person, for instance, has a tooth-ache or a head-ache, and he immediately be gins gins to consider how he came by it: he says to himself, "I have been sitting in a draught," or "I was up too late last night," or "I have been drinking too much," or "I wonder what could have taken me to that Thelwall's to be ranted to death." Accordingly it is probable that he finds out the real cause of his complaint, and is enabled to avoid it in future: or should he fail to discover it himself, his physician or his friend may do it for him. But let the same man be in an ill temper, or be seized with a fit of envy, or fall into a habit of stinginess, all of them maladies of an alarming nature and a thousand times more tormenting than head-aches or tooth aches,—and instead of searching into the cause of the disease, he is sure to begin glossing it over to himself and encouraging it's continuance: the spiritual physician does not think of interfering; and friends, who have been honest enough on such occasions to give advice, have generally found it so badly received, that they either fall in with the self-deception, or watch the disorder in silent agony. To probe the wound is in general only to make the patient worse. Tell him that his head-ache is owing to drinking wine, and he will agree with you; but tell him he is ill-tempered because somebody broke his wineglass, and his sullenness changes into anger. "Ill-tempered!" he will exclaim :-" I ill-tempered! Come, that's excessively ridiculous. Never was man of a better temper than myself; but the fact is, that it is on account of my good temper that I am so treated." So saying, he becomes twenty times worse, calls his wife "cursedly obedient," kicks a dog for being lazy whom he has taught to lie on a cushion,-slaps his child for doing some. thing which he suffers it to do every other hour of it's life; and woe betide the servant or the dependent who happens to be in his reach for the rest of the day. The envious man, in like man. ner, takes every possible means of persuading himself that in holding up every body as a fool, coxcomb, or knave, he is only justifiably severe or nobly contemptuous: he feels the torment of his disorder; he has no comfort in what gives pleasure to other people; the sunshine of other faces make him sick; and yet in. stead of looking into the cause of his mental soreness, he takes pains to make it worse in proportion as it galls him, and presents as lamentable a spectacle as an invalid who should sit pound. ing his own bruises or thumping his aching head. The miser's folly we have been accustomed from our infancy to hear compared to a dropsical thirst, which increases at every draught; but let us look at the more familiar instance of what is called stinginess, or a habit of mean economy, that is to say, an economy disproportionate to the necessity, and betraying itself as much by what it freely offers as by what it niggardly withholds. Those who are guilty of this vice lead a desperate life, especially if they see any company. company. No people take so much pains to deceive themselves and others, and no people succeed worse. You know them instantly by their anxious parsimony in great things and their still more anxious liberality in little. Such persons will practise all sorts of manœuvres to hinder you from drinking wine at dinner, and beg you to fall heartily on the bread and butter at tea. If there is the least excuse in the season, they will have no fruit for the desert, and be the first to lament the deficiency, or to cry out, with an air of sudden recollection, "Bless me, I might have preserved some fruit, if I had thought of it." If there is no such excuse in the season, they heap the table with bad apples and pears, and take a great deal of trouble to assure you that there are no better to be had. If they must surprise you with something decent or seasonable, they are careful to have as small a quantity as possible and as they are accustomed to deny themselves good things in private, they contrive to make a merit of that deficiency by eating none of the salmon or the green peas, and forcing upon your plate the remaining spoonful. But at other times, nothing shocks them so much as the not having enough: to spare what is homely, they think, must betray them at once; and there. fore, with lively denunciations, against people who serve up small dishes, and ardent entreaties that you will do them the favour of shewing a good appetite, they set before you the hugest and coarsest meats, complain all the time that you eat nothing, and finish the dinner with a pie that seems made for a set of paviors, and that almost requires pickaxes to get at the fruit. I say nothing of their more private anxieties-of their sidelong vigilance upon butter and sugar, their fortifications of pantry and coal-cellar, their lectures upon humility in general, and the shamefulness of waste in particular, the figures which they and their family cut on ordinary occasions, or the blaze which the wife and daughters make in company, contrasted with the ragged elbows and sullen visages of those who are left at home. It is sufficient, that they are always exposing themselves to contempt, always making it worse with their excuses, and always on thorns from their anxiety to deceive or their mortified consciousness of not deceiving. And all, for what? What is the cause of this fatal disorder, which cuts up their comfort by the roots, and which they can never be brought to remedy, much less to avow? It is the salvation of a few shillings, which no more makes up for the satisfaction and the respectability which they lose by keeping them, than laying by their hats or gowns could make up for the colds which they would catch, or the ridiculous figure they would cut in the streets. Besides, it is ten to one that the shillings are not saved after all, for though bad meals may not be so heartily eaten as good, yet the saving plan in clothes, furniture, &c. which seduces them to what are called L 2 cheap 66 called cheap shops, is found to be the most wasteful in the end; and the use of bad provisions, bad wine, bad butter, &c. is most probably revenged by a doctor's bill, which carries away all the shillings so painfully scraped off the table. Here, then, is a disorder as easily remedied as it is painful to themselves and disgusting to others; but give them a hint of it's existence-insinuate the least necessity of a cure, and you only rouse the obstinacy of a self-love, which from the sufferings which it persists to endure, might be rather called self-hatred. Yet supposing for an instant, that a doctor might be called in to mental as well as corporeal maladies, how entirely would he act, in the former cases, upon the principle of remedy in the latter! To the ill-tempered person he would say, Sir, your mind is subject to continual fever: we must do our endeavours to make you cooler, and to this end, I must insist that you keep yourself quiet. Avoid much meat, which fills your head with vapours, and much wine, which sets your blood in a riot; and when your system is brought down a little, and you get rid of this tendency to delirium, you will no longer turn pale at sight of an ill-roasted joint, or red at every joke that is aimed at you, or grow sullen at kindness, or become enraged at one that treads on your toe, or be fretful all day for having cut yourself while shaving, or wreak your revenge upon objects that cannot resist you, or suffer a pin, a hair, an inuendo, to make you wretched for a week to come, or in short, drive away all your friends from your infirmity, lest they should catch the contagion, or suffer all sorts of annoyances when you expose yourself." To the envious person he would say, "Sir or Ma. dam, your perceptions are all disordered, you are troubled with a spleen, which turns every thing you hear, see, and feel, to a monster, or at least to something which you try to persuade yourself is a monster. Seek the society of your friends, enter heartily into their amusements, and when you hear one of them say a good thing, or play a good tune, or receive a good compliment, try all you can to enjoy it as well as the rest. They will be surprised; they will become as social with you as with others; and instead of calling their faces ugly, their gestures fantastic, and their heads empty, you will find them very well-looking, decent, and sensible people; or, if their qualities should not amount to so much, you will at least not be disgusted with their manners, or impatient ať their ignorance; and above all, you will no longer be subject to that unhappy trick of fancying that in proportion as your ac quaintance appear respectable, you, who are their companion, must seem ridiculous. Thus we shall remove your disorder by going up to it's cause; your blood, which is inclined to become stagnant, will circulate freely from your heart; and you will shortly get rid of this intolerable oppression, which is neither more nor less less than a waking nightmare."-To the stingy person, the advice would be short and simple;-"My good friend, your heart's blood is too poor; you must live better; I do not mean richly, which is badly; but always have the best of what is necessary, and instead of laying by a few shillings to be wasted on the apothecary, or to purchase of yourself endless anxieties, throw them at the head of this imaginary necessity which haunts you, and which is a mere bugbear that destroys your comfort, and frightens away your friends." As to sheer avarice, it is, I am afraid, an incurable disease: the mortification has taken place; the heart is ossified; and a general rheumatism, locking up the faculties, prevents the wretched sufferer from administering even to the common sustenance of his nature. But if there is any crisis in such a malady, at which the mental physician could interpose, he would say, "Miserable being, shake off your lethargy and look about you. To what a state have you reduced herself! Your feelings have no play; you have no taste for a sound enjoyment; the eye of your conscience never closes. Nothing can save you but a recurrence to the grand and simple remedies which Nature and Reason furnish to the unvitiated. Your heart must be set free; it is too much confined in that narrow bosom : it wants air and exercise; it must walk abroad among the beauties of creation, where every thing breathes a glorious enlargement, and where you may regain your spirits for comfort and your appetite for be nevolence." But it is needless to expatiate on the obstructions which mental patients always present to their own cure with a madness so per tinacious. They will not only deny their disease altogether, but will swear they have not a symptom of it, though every thought, look, and action declare to the contrary. They are like vain persons with shoes too tight for their feet, who though galled at every step, and rendered ridiculous in every movement, would rather die on the spot than own themselves uncomfortable. Accord ingly they carry about their respective infirmities with a gravity so inflexible, that were we not convinced of their sufferings, their appearance would be altogether ludicrous, especially if we per sonified the figures they cut by the supposition of a similar beha❤ viour under bodily afflictions. For instance, the man of bad temper may be regarded as one with a whitlow at the end of every finger, which smarts with agony at the slighest touch, and which he nevertheless persists in keeping sore. The envious man is one who in the height of a fever is to be satisfied with nothing less than running his head against his neighbour's wall, or hanging him. self upon a pear-tree that looks over it, or getting his best friend to beat him about the head and shoulders. The ladies under this affliction resemble those superannuated gallants, who when |