INTRODUCTION OF FRETTING.

43

to-day and the tumultuous sense of malaise of yesterday, when the physic was operating; he is not aware that the irritation that was in his stomach and brain has been only transferred for the nonce to the lower bowels. But whatever he may think, he considers that his feelings give him perfect right to go on as usual in eating and drinking he does so, and, lo! the weight of food, the bitterness, the sourness, and the costiveness are there again. The play is played over again; again he applauds the players;-in a month the habit is established, and he cannot do without purgatives. Here there is another kind of fuel thrown upon the fire within him.

Turn we from the stomach and bowels-from the FOOD and PHYSIC,-to the brain-to the FRETTING. Allow me to introduce this agent, this bustling, active, efficient agent, this sleepless, worrying, wearing, and unwearied agent, to the readers of these pages. I have given a reason for not previously bringing him on the tapis when speaking of childhood. And though I introduce him now for the first time, it is not because I suppose my readers are unacquainted with him, especially in scrambling, money-making England, but because I may make them acquainted with

44

PRODUCTION OF ANXIETY.

his mode of proceeding, because I wish to expose his ways, (which are not "ways of pleasantness,") and because I have hereafter the "fell intent," the inhuman resolve to show them how to counteract his proceedings, how to circumvent his ways, and block up the avenues of his destructive attacks on the life of the individual.

I said that my business friend started with hope; that, sustained thereby, he was not conscious of the mighty efforts his brain was making in conflicting amid the struggles of competition and straitened capital. The first signs of the effects of these efforts are those I have described in the preceding paragraphs. I have said his alacrity for business declines somewhat: it is much more irksome than it used to be. Simultaneously with the stomach and bowel derangements, and with the greater effort to fulfil his affairs, he finds his hope of their success gradually,―very gradually, for man clings to hope with amazing pertinacity, fading as he enters on each new enterprise; and Fear, mixing its thick darkness with the radiancy of Hope, begets the uncertain hue of ANXIETY. He cannot tell how it is, but trade is not so fair and brisk as it used to be, (he may be growing rich all this while :) he cannot trust

INTESTINE COMMOTIONS.

45

people as he used to do, or he capriciously changes his confidence for the supposed chance of avoiding losses. His head, in short, is not clear: in which state, perchance, he makes one or two bad speculations. Worse and worse! more bile, more acidity, bowels more confined than ever! He never loses sight of business: his affairs are thorns to his pillow, and restless nights succeed to harassing days; the Inexorable Anxiety lays down by him at night and walks by his side at day. Two things he observes: the first, that he is somewhat better for a day or two after a sound purge: and next that drinking stimulants smothers the fiend for a brief period. To these then he flies more and more frequently. Moreover, as the capacity for wine and spirits increases, the capacity for food diminishes: his appetite begins to fail. The doctor gives him tonics in all shapes, from camomile tea to arsenic: by virtue of which he is enabled to cram down more food into a stomach less able to digest it. The plot thickens. Undigested food, mercurials, purgatives, tonics, in irritated stomach and bowels, bombard the brain with a perfect mitraille of horrible sensations. The brain, working hard but unable to digest the circumstances in which the individual is placed, getting

46 TIC, GOUT, RHEUMATISM, COUGH, &C.

no rest night or day, irritated almost to the point of insanity by the slightest as by the most momentous occurrences without, repays the compliment with a shower of pains and aches scattered, in its blind fury, over the entire system, and toothache, tic-doloureux, flying rheumatisms, and such like small shot are added to the grape-shot with which it sweeps the nerves of the stomach and bowels.

Arrived at this point of stomach and drug disorder, the system is ready to take on any form of disease. The irritations radiating from the two great centres of nervous power, the pit of the stomach and the brain, diverge in all directions, producing general derangement in the shape of fever or (if it affect the nerves only) hypochondriasis or else they converge upon some particular points, giving rise to cough, (when they converge on the lungs,) palpitations, when on the heart, tic of various kinds, when on individual nerves, rheumatism, when on the sheaths in which the muscles run, or gout, when on the ligaments that bind the small joints of the fingers and toes together.

But worse than all this; these irritations are not confined to the internal parts. The fretting

in the brain, and the food and physic in the alimentary canal, confine their operations to an interchange of mischievous abuse. Sometimes the belly abuses the brain so outrageously, as to drive it stark staring mad, a state commonly called "brain fever :" or else by a process of slow vexation, by "naggling," as such process is vulgarly but expressively denominated, the brain is kept in a simmering condition for a long time, and at length boils over in the state of insanity. In these cases the mischief is chiefly in the membranes or coverings of the brain. But sometimes the abuse in question causes the substance of the brain to swell with rage—that is, with blood: and on some day, after a meal, when turning the head, or in a fit of anger, (a not uncommon thing in this condition of stomach and brain,) a portion of that blood bursts through its vessels, presses on the brain, and behold a fit of apoplexy! So that my business friend (for we must not lose sight of him in this disquisition) is liable to apoplexy as well as his confrères in disease who have no fretting to assist the food and physic. I will not dwell on the interludes of headaches, giddiness, occasional dimness of sight, &c., that attend