tow-a mutton-chop becomes a fiery crab, rending the interior with its claws and even rice-pudding has the intolerable effrontery to become revivified as a hedge-hog. After that come nausea and vomiting. You derive no benefit from the food you swallow. From twelve-stone weight you dwindle down to ten. Your countenance becomes ghastly, your eyes hollow, and you totter prematurely on your pins. The mere notion of exercise becomes distasteful. You feel as if you had no strength for anything. You are pensive, moody, and irritable. Your mind loses its elasticity and power; and when you sit down to compose, instead of manly matter, you produce nothing but the dreariest of drivel.

Such, without any exaggeration, is dyspepsia. It is a malady for which the pharmacopæia affords no certain cure, and which, in numerous instances, sets the skill of the physician at defiance. In fact, even the ablest practitioners exhibit themselves as empirics when they are called upon to deal with the stomach. They have no more insight into the matter than the old wife who prescribes camomile-tea or an infusion of nettle-tops-nay, we incline to the opinion that the old wife knows more about such things than do our modern Sangrados. The latter may treat you with zinc and arsenic, nux vomica, or nitrous acid, but you will not be one whit the better for their applications. Camomile, on the other hand, is a natural tonic, and may avail somewhat as a restorative, but not when the disease is at its worst. Then as to diet, it is really painful to observe the disagreement that prevails among the faculty. One doctor recommends total abstinence from vegetables, and adherence to plain animal food. Another tells you that without a due proportion of vegetables the stomach will not regain its tone. "Take a glass or two of dry sherry daily," quoth one medico, "and something light for lunch-brown bread and butter,

and a shrimp or so-nothing worse than an empty stomach. My good friend, you are too abstemious-you absolutely require a stimulant." "Do you drink wine?" quoth a gaunt teetotaller, with a voice that might emanate from a sepulchre ; "no wonder, then, that your digestive organs are deranged! Alcohol, sir, is but another word for the most virulent of all poisons. Shun sherry- avoid amontillado — let brandy be as a thing accursed! Drink water only, the best of all solvents; and so shall it be well with you both here and hereafter." What is a poor fellow to do when he finds the faculty at loggerheads, and as much divided in opinion as was once the Catholic Church with regard to the observance of Easter? They may not differ as to the nature and cause of the malady—it is when they try to effect a cure that they find themselves comparatively helpless. Nor is it fair to blame them, for rare indeed are the cases in which dyspeptic patients will surrender themselves to their charge without conditions. "I shall faithfully obey your prescriptions, Doctor," says one patient, whose pangs are at times so severe that he writhes like a lob-worm on the hook; "only you must remember that I cannot afford to strike work. Laborare est orare. What would become of my business if I were to absent myself in time of session?" Physic and drench me as you please," says another; "neither to pill nor potion will I object; but I would as soon go down in a divingbell as undertake a voyage in a yacht!" "A pedestrian tour for six weeks through Switzerland!" cries a third; "carrying my own knapsack, I suppose! Why not tell me to put peas in my shoes and make the pilgrimage to Loretto?" "I am writing a book," quoth a fourth, to whom dinner is a thought of dread; "and I shall not stir hence till I have finished it, and, moreover, corrected the proofsheets." We do verily believe that there are few cases of dyspepsia so

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bad that they might not be overcome by timely and continuous exercise; but, as we have already said, it is a peculiarity of the disease that it engenders an intense hatred of exertion, and the main difficulty is to persuade the patient to struggle against this torpid feeling. It is not wise to press him to undertake all at once some physical labour which would act as a severe strain to the thewes and sinews. It is not a Milo who has to be put into training, but a Sybarite who could no more lift a new-born calf than he could support the world upon his shoulders.

This is, no doubt, a melancholy picture; but, to confess the truth, we have no desire that it should be otherwise. Eager students, literary men, and professional devotees, stand greatly in need of warning and advice; for rarely do we pace the street without encountering some sallow-faced miserable-looking object-spent, worn, and attenuated-from whose cheek the healthy bloom has prematurely departed, and whose enfeebled gait and lacklustre eye show that he is a victim to the pangs of remorseless dyspepsia. It is all very well to tell us that this is pre-eminently the age of intellectual exertion, and that the man who seeks distinction must win it through extraordinary labour. Granted; but what are we to think of a system of training,

the inevitable result of which must be a break-down in the midst of the career? Body and mind are so mysteriously and intimately united, that if you neglect the former the latter cannot choose but suffer; for the body is the visible machine which must be kept in order and be properly tended, else the mental product will be greatly and grievously deteriorated.

Such, then, is the malady; not necessarily, as we have said, the result of excess or of riotous living, but traceable in almost every instance to neglect of the primary laws for the preservation of the natural health. Many who read these pages will doubtless, from their own experience, admit that we have accurately stated the causes, and by no means exaggerated the symptoms, of the disease; and for them there is a plentiful harvest of hope if they will only avail themselves of the curative means within their reach; for the stomach, however offended, is not altogether an implacable organ, and many a sallow student who has been sorely vexed by dyspepsia, has ere now plumped out into a comfortable parson, and can play such a knife and fork as would strike terror into the soul of a vegetarian. But, in describing the MALADY, we have covered our allotted space; and must reserve for another paper the consideration of the CURE.

WHEN that well-known British traveller, Leo Rusticus, Esq., pays his visit to Oxford with his interesting daughters about Commemoration time, and makes the tour of the university under the eyes of criticising undergraduates, he usually finds his way at last into Christchurch Cathedral. True, there is very little to be seen there, for it is about the ugliest possible of collegiate churches; still, it is a cathedral, and therefore, like other cathedrals, to be "done" as a duty. And feeling this, like the British Lion in general, he does it. There, amongst other objects of interest, the attendant verger will point out to him (if he does his duty) in the north aisle, high up against a pillar, a small bust, with a Latin inscription underneath, and a queer-looking diagram stuck rather awkwardly on one side of it, which the young ladies will probably at the first glance take for a sun-dial, but which is in truth an astrological calculation of a nativity. "Burton, sir," says the verger, succinctly pointing up to it "author of the Anatomy formerly student of this house." The young ladies conclude him to have been some medical celebrity; but papa, with the superior information for which the gentlemen of the family of Rusticus have always been distinguished, volunteers a word of explanation" Anatomy of Melancholy, you know, my dears." Neither of the dears know much about it; but the verger strikes in. "Yes, sir," says that worthy, "he was a very melancholy gentleman, and is supposed to have destroyed himself; and that's his horrorsscope." Miss Leonina, not at all disposed at present to anatomise melancholy, skips on to the next monument; and papa, after a nod intended to imply that the whole subject is familiar to him, thinks it as well to follow. He knows he has the book upon his library shelves

at home, and has an impression that it is considered a clever thing; but he is by no means prepared to undergo an extempore examination as to its contents. He has seen the work so often alluded to, and in such high terms of praise, that he has little doubt but that all the educated world are perfectly well acquainted with it, and that his own ignorance on the subject is highly inexcusable. He need not judge himself so hardly. If he were to question in succession all the Fellows of the college where he will dine to-day as to their own personal acquaintance with the Anatomy of Melancholy, he would scarcely find more than one among them who had read the book. He would discover that their knowledge of it, like his own, had been gained from passing allusions to it in other writers, or bibliographical notices in booksellers' catalogues. They will all have heard, no doubt, that it was the only book that could get the great Samuel Johnson out of bed two hours before his wont in the morning; but its present effect upon the early rising of Oxford would be admitted to be quite inappreciable.

The

The truth is, that Burton's book is what everybody has heard of, and few people have read. Its popularity was always uncertain, and subject to ebbs and flows. At its first appearance it seems to have been quite what we should now call the book of the season. author himself, in his Address to the Reader prefixed to the fourth edition, tells us that "the first, second, and third editions were suddenly gone, eagerly read, and not so much approved by some, as scornfully rejected by others." Whether the author profited or not, in a pecuniary way, by this rapid sale, the booksellers, according to Antony-aWood (not an authority always to be trusted), got an estate by it, having disposed of no less than eight

editions-five in Burton's lifetime. It afterwards fell into comparative neglect. Mr Steevens remarks that it "is not noticed by either Addison, Pope, or Swift; nay, it even escaped the notice of that excursive reader Arbuthnot, who was familiarly acquainted with more books than the preceding triumvirate ever heard of." It rose again into temporary demand, owing to the laudatory notices of it by Johnson, Warton, and others the price of a copy rising in consequence, says Steevens, "from one shilling and sixpence to a guinea and a half," but soon relapsed into comparative neglect; and although it has always had its enthusiastic readers and admirers, the reading public in general has been content to take its merits upon trust. Such is the fate at present of many an author's works more worthy than even old Burton to be ranked amongst our English classics. There they are, in rows along the walls of our libraries, like ladies of a certain age in a ball-room, well known by name and sight, and highly respected, but whom no gentleman has the hardihood to take in hand. It would be an interesting branch of literary statistics, and might lead to some rather startling results, to ascertain what proportion of professed admirers of Shakespeare have any intimate acquaintance with his plays beyond what Mr Kean has given them, or how many who talk familiarly of the great Lord Bacon ever read a line of his, except in a quotation. Southey once said that if his library (14,000 volumes) were necessarily cut down to nineteen, it should consist of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton; Jeremy Taylor, South, and Thomas Jackson, as divines; Lord Clarendon, Isaak Walton, Sir Thos. Brown, Fuller's Church History, and Sidney's Arcadia. There can be very little doubt that a small travelling library so selected-say for a modern English gentleman going out for ten years to China-would at least have one

important recommendation-most of them would be, to all intents and purposes, new books, and would probably last him a long time.

We will not make any apology, in these days of æsthetic revivalism, when we are all wearing our grandmothers' hoops, and going back to worse than our great-grandfathers' superstitions, for a re-introduction of our readers to Robert Burton and his Anatomy. A book which fascinated men of such different minds as Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb, Lord Byron and Archbishop Herring, does not deserve to lie unread. Possibly the terms in which Byron speaks of it may seem to recommend it especially to the taste of the present day. "The book," says he, "in my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read with the least trouble, is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; the most amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes I ever perused. But a superficial reader must take care, or his intricacies will bewilder him. If, however, he has patience to go through his volumes, he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted-at least in the English language."* We cannot so far endorse this statement of Lord Byron's as to recommend a reading-up of the Anatomy in order to enable any ambitious friend to shine as a talker at a modern intellectual dinnerparty. We doubt very much whether, even in the poet's own day, such an undertaking would have repaid an aspirant to conversational eminence. Such authorities as Peter Lombard, and Jerome Cardan, and Lipsius, and Paracelsus, or even Lucian (and these are household names compared with some of Burton's out-of-the-way acquaintances), if introduced in conversation either in this or the last generation, would be likely to win for a man little re

putation except for pedantry. But if the volumes seem to have been rather overrated as a storehouse for talkers, they were no doubt found exceedingly useful for another class, quite as important, and very nearly as large, the writers who "wished to acquire the reputation of being well read with the least trouble." Burton's brains have been well picked in this way since his death; and it is a pity that he could not have returned for a while in his own person to detect and castigate, in his own peculiar style, those who availed themselves of his prodigious reading, and excursive forays into all manner of unknown literary districts, to gain for themselves the credit of original research. Hearne calls the book, in his day, "a commonplace for filchers." Anthony Wood says the same; "it is so full," says he," of variety of reading, that gentlemen who have lost their time, and are put to a push for invention, may furnish themselves with matter for scholastical discourse and writing. Several authors have stolen matter from the said book without any acknowledgment." It may seem almost treason to place Milton in the foreground of these; but there can be no doubt but that at least the idea, if not some of the imagery, of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are taken from the " Dialogue between Pleasure and Pain," or "The Author's Abstract of Melancholy," which Burton prefixed to his book; though the dazzling wealth of language and fancy with which Milton has clothed the thought has no prototype in his quaint predecessor, whose verses, nevertheless, have considerable beauty of their own. We may presume that most of the plunderers to whom Wood and others allude have escaped the notice of posterity because the stolen

property has passed into oblivion with the rest of their work: the only thief who appears to have been convicted and executed is Sterne. Dr Ferriar brought him to justice; and if any proof were required of the little acquaintance which the reading world in Sterne's time had with the remarkable work of Burton, it may be found in the fact that amongst all the admirers of Tristram Shandy not one seems to have recognised the borrowed feathers of wit and fancy which the writer so unblushingly paraded. It seems to a reader of the present day almost incomprehensible that one who possessed such remarkable original powers as Sterne did, should have ventured to risk his reputation as an author by such bold plagiarisms as those, for instance, which Dr. Ferriar points out in the "Fragment on Whiskers."* Nothing can satisfactorily explain it, but an impudent confidence that the literary triflers of the day, who delighted in his clever double entendres, and took out their scented handkerchiefs at his tinsel sentiment, would have only sneered at the officious bookworm who should be so troublesome as to refer them to an old musty folio for the source of some of their favourite's originalities.

But it is time to introduce our present readers to Burton himself. Of his life, unfortunately, little is known beyond the very driest facts. That he was a younger son of an old Leicestershire family, educated at Sutton Coldfield and Nuneaton grammar-schools, entered as a commoner of Brasennose at the age of seventeen, and thence elected a student of Christchurch, are not particulars which help us much towards a picture of the man. It was within the walls of the latter college that he appears to