and healthy. It seems to result from people's acting on a mistaken view of the nourishment, necessary for the body, that Europeans often die of diseases and accidents from which Indians generally recover. The celebrated J. Hunter, whose sagacity and attention to physiology seems unparalleled, distinctly noticed this habit of living above par, as he called it, and regarded it as the reason why so many diseases became incurable.

Another observation may be made in regard to epidemics. Some of the more violent of them certainly affect soonest those individuals who are the most exposed out of doors. And yet, constantly being in the open air, is one of the undoubted modes of promoting health and longevity. On this head, I must observe, that there may be certain qualities of the air, during which, it would be better to be sheltered from its effects. But, certainly, of those who are infected with pestilence from exposure, those will be most affected whose previous habits have been indolence and close cofinement: from a well known principle of physiology, that the susceptibility varies inversely as the application of the stimulus.

For the cure of pestilential fever, when it has actually occurred, I would, by no means, omit the customary habits of using the bath, of bleeding, of purgatives, &c. &c. &c., according to the nature of the disease, and habit of body of the patient. But previous habits of taking stimulus render us less capable of using it medically, and also, on the other hand, render dangerous lowering processes necessary in other kinds of cases.

The principal thing, however, is to remove the patient from the source of the distemper; and what I have adverted to as a movable hospital is, that the Fever Institutions should, every where, rather make arrangements for moving away the patients into a better atmosphere, than to fix the spot of the hospital, which may happen to be in the place the most insalubrious, at the time of the epidemic since the sudden occurrence of these diseases, their periodical returns, the kind of persons they attack, their range and direction, and their spontaneous subsidence, under different modes of treatment, are circumstances which must incline one to regard them as caused, in a great measure, by a pestilential constitution of the atmosphere, operating more or less locally.

!

ON THE

GREEK REVOLUTION.

BY

CHARLES BRINSLEY SHERIDAN, Esq.

La sagesse n'est que la mesure.-MAD. DE STAEL.

SECOND EDITION,

WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES..

LONDON:

VOL. XXIV.

Pam.

NO. XLVIII.

2 D

IMPATIENT to protest against doctrines which I only met with a fortnight since in Mr. Hughes's "Appeal" and "War in Greece," I have hastened to the goal without prancing about in periods; anxious to write fast rather than well, and to procure justice for the cause, not celebrity for the advocate of Greece. I have no time for an operation of such length as shortening my statement, or even for softening down what may offend those, who have been just confirmed in making religion an engine of persecution, by seeing the Catholic peers again exiled from their birthright, because they will not purchase justice by apostacy, If I have talked of sconcing those short commons of spiritual food, or, (since God sends meat

of spiritual cooks, on which the Irish episcopalians contrive to keep their souls alive; or have fancied the spoliation worse than the conversion of heretics, and an overfed hierarchy as bad as a sanitary inquisition; or have neglected to forget, that of the fugitive priests whom England charitably fed, some had been prelates wealthier and mightier than even "the primate of all Ireland;" I hope that these interwoven heresies will not prejudice the English jury against my clients. A man linked with no party, and privileged by insignificance to vacillate, may outgrow such morbid sentiments, but I am too new to authorship to have yet learned to hide them. An Englishman, and a Protestant, may surely blame a system which disgraces England, and almost desecrates Christianity, without denying the worth of many individual Irish clergymen, or assailing the English church, whose debtor and creditor account to the public good shows a balance in its favor; and which clinging to the fabric of the state, and growing out of the foundations of property, cannot be roughly handled without shaking both. But there are alternatives, which might calm the inflammation of Ireland; and a reform, which would not amount to revolution.

I have spoken contemptuously of Austria, for I had to consider her dealings with foreigners, which are usually mean or tyrannical; had I reviewed her domestic policy, I should have said, that exacting from her subjects a more than filial obedience, she treats them with almost parental mildness; and that her system of suffocating intellect as an enemy, and treating men like children, may suit a population better fed than taught, though it irritates those restless and sensitive Italians, who are suffering so severely for the crime of not being a homogeneous impenetrable mass.

I should have been more diffident in passing judgment, if I had originally meant to prefix to these pages a name, which forms their sole chance of attracting attention.

If any critical Ibis, whose beak checks the plague of literary serpents, should pierce this minute ephemeral production, though I may shrink from that sensitiveness, which the earliest and deepest trials of sensibility cannot raise us quite above, I shall never repent trying to redeem the character of England, and to promote the interests of Greece.

Portugal-street, August 3, 1822.

THOUGHTS

ON THE

GREEK REVOLUTION.

WHEN I heard that a writer of some eminence had taken up the cause of the Greeks, and that an animated and eloquent Pamphlet had appeared from the pen of Mr. Hughes, I fondly thought that their case was at length fairly laid before the English nation.

Having read Mr. Hughes's appeal, I feel dissatisfied with pleadings so impassioned and partial, and regret that his name should confirm, and his language embellish, the prevailing error, that the present struggle is an attempt to drive the Turks out of Europe. Mr. Hughes not only assumes this, but he assumes, that it is an easy and desirable operation. He should consider what it is to expatriate millions of our fellow-creatures, with women and children, who, though innocent of all guilt, must be involved in the general sentence. He should remember that the scenes, which he has so eloquently described, occur only where the two populations are interwoven; that Rumelia is inhabited chiefly by Turks, and that "the Aga or Turkish country gentleman," is not every where a faithful original of "The Saracen's Head," for which he has made him sit; but that in the paroxysms of national anarchy, the innocent and helpless suffer, while the able and ferocious fatten on the spoil. Even in the French Revolution, when men are generally allowed to have approached nearer to the nature of dæmons than at any other period in the history of the world, it was the guilt of a portion only which involved the mass of the nation in such misery. He should reflect, that it is no such easy task to

1

' Vide Lord Byron.