long been lost in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now afflict the universe. "Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium." Sleep, therefore, is the panacea he prescribes for the physical and metaphysical regeneration of our race, so that it may in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber.

To the like effect protests an able essayist of our day against tendencies to overrate the endless facilities of speedy locomotion now enjoyed, as if they were a boon without a drawback; and he professes not to regard as particularly attractive or elevating the sight of mankind scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither over the face of the earth, like eager, energetic ants, with little bits of straw or other rubbish packed on their heads. Ought we not rather, it is asked, to look on tranquillity, and equilibrium, and regularity, as the normal condition of things? and in the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and havoc which they make in "plain living"-how they practically shorten the days of a man?

The haste and hurry of modern English civilization, it has been elsewhere observed, ever increasing and carrying us more impetuously forward, tend to deaden all capacity for simpler enjoyments, and all sense of the worth of a tranquil life on which the eyes of all the world are not fixed. And whenever, as a reflective discourser remarks, people set their heads to constant work, we may be perfectly certain that they are losing more than they gain, and are sinking in the scale at once of meditative and social beings. The accomplished author of an essay on Leisure-the cultivation of which as an art is thought to be in danger of dying out amongst us--says of that activity which never relaxes sufficiently to allow time. for a calm and more or less passive contemplation of life as a whole, that it is "apt to degenerate into mere hand-to-mouth fussiness or drudgery, and can be justified only by necessity." The very repose of leisure is accordingly pronounced a by no means purely selfish enjoyment-it being one of the most

communicable, nay, contagious, of pleasures; for there are people, we are reminded, whose company is as restful as sleep, in whose presence hurry seems like a bad dream when it is past, and whom one leaves with a sense of refreshment and renewed energy such as is produced by a good night's rest. And this writer contends that to afford such refreshment to others may often be turning time to better account than to crowd it with self-chosen business. Not that the fact is not duly insisted upon that too little work is as fatal as too much to that lightness and alacrity of spirit which are needed for the conversion of spare time into hours of leisure worthy to be so called. Some natures, indeed, and they are of a high order, sometimes of the highest, find one leisure hour at a time as much as they can away with, and anon

"The hour of rest is gone,

And urgent voices round them cry,
'Ho, lingerer, hasten on !'

"And has the soul, then, only gained,
From this brief time of ease,

A moment's rest, when overstrained,
One hurried glimpse of peace?"

Nay something better and more abiding than that.

"then

But to conclude. The notion, as expounded by an essayist on "Short Cuts," that if a thing is to be done at all, 'twere well it were done quickly," admirable as it may be on the Exchange, is justly said to rub the delicacy and bloom off life when it is made the ruling maxim in all other relations and positions: a life with leisure hours in it for watching and examining all that we pass being a much more enviable and rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to another, from one sort of fame or power or opulence to another and more remote. When the ambitious hero in Sir Henry Taylor's dramatic poem declares in the storm and stress of his career,

"We have not time to mourn,"

"The worse for us!" is his good counsellor's rejoinder :

"He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure

For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow's held intrusive and turn'd out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.
Yet such the barrenness of busy life!
From shelf to shelf Ambition clambers up
To reach the naked'st pinnacle of all,
While Magnanimity, absolved from toil,
Reposes self-included at the base."

A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT.
PROVERBS xxiii. 2.

ING Solomon's discreet counsel to him that feasts with

royalty, to put a knife to his throat, if he be a man given to appetite, may be advantageously enlarged in its application to diners-out, or for the matter of that, to diners at home, all and sundry. Sitting to eat with a ruler, the guest is admonished to consider diligently what is before him; and at the same time to be not desirous of the great man's dainties, for they are deceitful meat. Any and every man given to appetite will do well to chew the cud of this bitter fancy; and the prophylactic application of a knife to the throat, forbidding rash ingress and intemperate speed of swallow, is wholesome for all estates and degrees of men among us, and might beneficially be a standing order for all times.

Adam Smith, in his "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," calls it "indecent" to express any strong degree of those passions which arise from a certain situation or disposition of the body; because the company, not being in the same disposition, cannot be expected to sympathize with them; and he mentions violent hunger as being, though upon many occasions not only natural, but unavoidable, yet “always indecent; and to eat voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners." There is, however, he allows, some degree of sympathy, even with hunger, and we may add, even on the part of a ruler at whose table sits the man given to appetite. Lewis the Fourteenth,

himself a gourmand, and, which is different, an enormous eater, liked to see a dinner guest disposing wholesale of the royal cates, if only by way of keeping himself in countenance, while achieving the like result. Royalty has, indeed, again and again been addicted to surfeiting, and sometimes of a memorably fatal sort. Alexander Jannæus died of gluttony, during the siege of Ragaba. Soliman, the seventh khalif of the race of the Ommiyades, died of a surfeit at Chalcis, in Syria, while preparing to lead an army to Constantinople.* Of the emperor

Jovian, we read in Gibbon, that one night, at the obscure town Dadastana, after indulging himself with a redundant supper, he retired to rest, and was next morning found dead in his bed— an event ascribed by some, though not by all, to the quality of the mushrooms, plus the quantity of wine, which he had swallowed in the evening. The same historian rather more than suspects that the mortal disease of Athanaric the Goth "was contracted amidst the pleasures of the imperial banquets," by Theodosius provided. Pope Benedict XI. is said to have died of a surfeit of fruit—some beautiful fresh figs, of which he was very fond, being offered to him in a silver basin by a veiled novice, as if from the abbess of the convent of St. Petronilla, in Perugia: "The pope, not suspecting a gift from such a hand, ate them eagerly, and without having them previously tasted." That he died of poison, few in that age, as Milman says, would venture to doubt, but the poisoning power of arrears of undigested food has never been quite rated at its full value. The same hesitation between fruit surfeit and poison, obtains in the case of King John, whose death, by one account due to the fatal drug administered by a Cistercian monk, by another is attributed to an intemperate indulgence at supper in fruit and new cider. The Emperor Frederick III. contracted his last

* He is said to have emptied two baskets of figs and of eggs, which he swallowed alternately, and the repast was concluded with marrow and sugar. In one of his pilgrimages to Mecca, Soliman is asserted to have eaten, at a single meal, seventy pomegranates, a kid, six fowls, and a huge quantity of the grapes of Tayaf. "If," says, Gibbon, "the bill of fare be correct, we must admire the appetite rather than the luxury of the sovereign of Asia."-Hist. Rom. Empire, ch. lii.

illness, some say, by a surfeit of melons.

And is there not, in

the case of our Henry I., what has been called that tale of royal excess so concisely and pathetically told in nursery history? "He never smiled again, and died of a surfeit of lampreys." The regicide lampreys, Moore calls them in one place; and in another, after citing Hume's remark on them, as " a food which always agreed better with his [Henry's] palate than his constitution," a dish so indigestible, that a late novelist, at the end of his book, could imagine no more summary mode of getting rid of all his heroes and heroines than by a hearty supper of stewed lampreys. In yet another the same squib-writer has a cruel simile, "just as honest King Stephen his beaver might doff to the fishes that carried his kind uncle off." To a surfeit of red herrings is ascribed the death of Robert Greene, the dramatist. The trap for the life of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was baited, as De Quincey expresses it, with toasted cheese. Kaiser Karl VI. was the victim of a voracious repast on mushrooms stewed in oil.

When Hadrian found his illness on the increase, and his end approaching, he removed to Baiæ, where, "in spite of the prescriptions [or proscriptions ?] of his physicians, he began to eat and drink according to his pleasure." The excesses of Charles V. in the same way are exceptionally notorious. Of that "little, spare, aguish, peevish, supper-eating" sovereign, Frederick the Great, who loved his dishes the more they tormented him, it is on record, that on the approach of death, "this warrior full of courage and sage speculation," could not resist the customary pepper and sauce piquante, though he knew it would inevitably result in a nightmare, "turning his bed into a nest of monsters." So with the Duke Augustus commemorated by Perthes: "All medical skill was in vain, for this half crazy prince could not deny himself the stimulus of the hottest spices." Mr. Tennyson's dying Northern Farmer is only too true a type of his kind :—

"What atta stannin' theer for, an' doesn bring ma the yaäle ?
Doctor's a'tottler, lass, an a's hallus i' the owd taäle;

I weänt break rules for doctor, a knaws naw more nor a floy ;
Git ma my yaäle I tell tha, an' gin I mun doy I mun doy."