to the nightwatches proclaimed by the Cock, in that scene in Comus where the two brothers, in search of their sister, are benighted in a forest :

Unmuffle, ye faint stars; and thou, fair Moon,
That wont'st to love the traveller's benison,
Stoop thy pale visage through an amber cloud,
And disinherit Chaos, that reigns here
In double night of darkness and of shades;
Or, if your influence be quite dammed up
With black usurping mists, some gentle taper,
Though a rushcandle from the wicker hole
Of some clay habitation, visit us

With thy longlevelled rule of streaming light;
And thou shalt be our star of Arcady,
Or Tyrian Cynosure. Or, if our eyes
Be barred that happiness, might we but hear
The folded flocks penned in their wattled cotes,
Or sound of pastoral reed with oaten stops,
Or whistle from the lodge, or village Cock
Count the Nightwatches to his feathery dames,-
'Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering,
In this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.

November 28. St. Stephen the younger Martyr.
St. James Confessor.

HYGEIA. We were much struck with the remark of Mr. Abernethy, that numerous kinds of local diseases, which for a long time had remained unimproved by various topical applications, had yielded to the effects of a few grains of the Blue Pill and a vegetable diet drink taken internally; and that in general local remedies are of less avail even in ulcers, tumours, and sores of any description, than alterative medicines are. Since we have seen these observations, many years' experience has convinced us of their truth, and the facts they relate to are explanable on this principle There is so great a sympathy between the organs of digestion and the constitution at large, that any disorder of the former affects the latter immediately by sympathy, and rouses into action all those morbid tendencies in the body which long continued unhealthy habits had predisposed it to. Moreover, the state of the constitution, or of the blood as it is called, mainly depends on the quality as well as the quantity of our diet; and the vain pretensions of animal chemistry, which asserts that the matter of digested nutriment is the same in every individual whose digestion is good, are refuted at once by the fact, that a vegetable diet produces both temporary as well as lasting changes of a beneficial nature on the

human body at large. Although in some persons accustomed to animal food, the diet of vegetables at first produces a few inconveniencies, yet the intellect always becomes clearer, the mind more powerful and capable of more continued action, the secretions purer, and the painful symptoms of bodily and local diseases greatly abated: these are its first effects. Remotely, a spare diet, made up chiefly of herbs and grain, frees the body from many constitutional diseases, renders the healing of wounds more certain and easy, improves the teeth, gums, and the eyesight, and in general affords to the whole animal machine an additional and more permanent guarantee against derangement, which ordinary attention to the state of the stomach and bowels gives us in a limited and temporary degree. On a similar principle we must explain the surprising benefit derived in cases condemned by medical men as hopeless, from the vegetable syrups and infusions which the country people have known from time immemorial, of which it has fallen to our lot to witness some most extraordinary instances.

Medical men, accustomed as they are to see some of the most reputed and powerful drugs fail to cure Scrofula, Scurvy, and many diseases of the constitution, wonder at the obstinacy of those who, rejecting the aid of the Physician, persevere in taking Alehoof tea, infusions of Balm, of Chervil, of Sarsaparilla, syrups of Coltsfoot, and other vegetable drinks, which the kind hospitable woods provide. But long experience, which beggars medical hypothesis, has established their reputation, and we have seen their good effects, and been obliged to acknowledge them before inquiry had furnished us with a clue to their mode of operating. They seem in fact to possess a power of quieting irritation in the stomach and bowels almost immediately, and by degrees of correcting the state of the fluids in general, and thus have a twofold dominion over diseases which spring up in disordered and corrupt constitutions in consequence of irritation induced in the digestive organs. Abstinence, by rendering the digestion of what little food we take the more perfect, has a similar effect. It seems that formerly in Europe, when mankind lived mostly on flesh, these vegetable drinks were more necessary and more in vogue; but their use at present is too much neglected: if introduced into pharmacy, we believe they would be much more beneficial by their safe and certain mode of curing diseased habits of body, than the precarious and more rapid methods now sought for in calomel and the mineral medicines in general. They constitute the medicina simpler which instinct seems to have pointed out in the infancy of science, which successive

generations have improved on, and which the excellent and practical observations of Mr. Abernethy and his school of medicine have revived and confirmed in these our later days.

Closely connected with the above doctrine is the question of diet in general; and, after a long and painful experimental inquiry into the effects of different sorts and combinations of food on the health, we are convinced with Dr. Lambe that a light and vegetable regimen, with abstinence from wine and fermented liquors, is the best; and though from want of habit it may not agree with the stomach at first, but produce torpor of the bowels and languor of body in general, yet so great is the additional security against the attacks of disease and the premature encroachments of old age, produced by this regimen, that it is worth while, even in those few constitutions where it does not agree at first, to persevere till habit reconciles them to its lesser degree of stimulus, for the sake ultimately of enjoying its beneficial effects. For, independently of the consideration of present disease, we must ever bear in mind that, in the animal economy, the susceptibility of action varies inversely as the application of the stimulus; and that though we know little of the nature of the vital fountain, we have abundant reason to believe that it is capable of being prematurely exhausted, and a decay of the body actually anticipated by the use of repletion and stimulating food, accompanied with all the multiform diseases which occur in the conclusion of a complicated animal machine, gradually put to death by fluctuating and unnatural means, instead of a slow and natural decay. So that the physician as well as the moralist has reason to commend the ancient proverbial saying of David, that better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than the stalled ox and hatred therewith.

We by no means intend by these reflections to beguile. the reader into any notion that such diet and medicines as we have described are a panacea for all complaints. We are desirous not to divert him from inquiring into the numerous causes of disease to be sought for in the complicated nature of man's brain and nervous system, acting in a thousand ways on the circulation and body at large. Anger will inflame, fear will paralyze, hope and faith stimulate, and despair enfeeble the vital energies of our frame, and thus the mind can influence the body, through the medium of the cerebral system, more powerfully in man than in other animals. Epidemical disorders also must in all constitutions have a certain influence; but a sound and unirritated constitution is the best guardian of the health against their malign influence; and while we acknowledge the power of such a

diet and medicines as tend to uphold the constitution, we should not overlook certain causes of disease which Virgil has emphatically coupled with repletion in that memorable passage in which he infers that cattle are not exempt from epidemics, although free from these abuses :

Atqui non Massica Bacchi

Munera non illis epulae nocuere repostae,
Frondibus et victu pascuntur simplicis herbae
Pocula sunt fontes liquidi atque exercita cursu
Flumina, nec somnos abrumpit cura salubres.

November 29. St. Saturninus Bishop and Martyr. St. Saturninus Martyr. St. Radbad Bishop and Confessor.

CHRONOLOGY.-Mortimer Earl of March executed in 1330.

Utility and Pleasure.-Popular language has in most ages affected to value the USEFUL more than the DELIGHTFUL, as they are distinguished in ordinary discourse. Nevertheless etymology, that grand scrutineer of the genealogy and power of human ideas, will not bear us out in this opinion. Utility is that which we use or employ as a means of obtaining some end. Now, as the end of all human energy is the achievement of pleasure in some form or other, so the useful may be defined to be the means of acquiring the delightful. To prefer, therefore, that which is useful to that which is pleasing is to prefer the means of pleasure to its fruition, than which nothing can be more absurd. These reflections were suggested by our noticing a certain maudlin and puritanical mode of considering, or of affecting to consider, all our enjoyments with reference to some real or imagined ulterior utility, which seems to have prevailed in Europe, and particularly in England, since the unhappy times of the parliamentary war; but of which Asiatics have no idea in the daily indulgence of an ennobled sensuality on a magnificent scale. To undervalue amusement-sheer and unconnected amusement-is both unphilosophical and immoral. To divert the mind from evil broodings, and help it forward in the business of life, is the natural function of amusement. And the gloom of a protestant Sunday in large towns, which drives the philosopher to the retirement of his garden, and the illiterate into solitary vice and mischief, so far from being an incentive to virtue and piety, is as it were a dark pall drawn over the features of religion. The cold and deathlike hand of the Reformation is visible in

the dull and disgusting alehouse scenes of a drunken Sunday afternoon in Holland, Britain, and the North of Germany, coupled with closely shut up shops and empty theatres, whose muses seem already numbered with the dead; while in France, Ireland, and other Catholic countries, an additional fervour of devotion at church is followed in the evening by festive hilarity and professed amusement. The poor are sober and happy, because they have diversions to engage their attention and expand their animal spirits, and the harmony of multitudes assembled to please and be pleased is every where conspicuous.

In viewing the sordid vices, and swill insolence, of a sabbath night among the British plebeians, with their concomitant quarrels, arising as they do from that mistaken custom which excludes the mechanic from amusement on the only day on which he can enjoy it, the

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

is apt to force itself, however ungratefully, on the mind of the most devout observer; while the prospect of service rendered to God, coupled with pleasure afforded to man, on Sundays and fêtes in France, elevates our notions of the wisdom of those who framed and adapted the institutions of Christianity to human nature. For no one can have observed mankind and be ignorant that those institutions are always the most influential on the conduct, which most powerfully appeal to the sentiments and passions, and with which the greatest number of pleasing thoughts are associated. And it is on a Catholic festival that we see rendered in unison Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will towards men. Those who are accustomed to puritanical dulness and gloomy hypocrisy may view such gorgeous exhibitions, as well as the amusements which follow, as substituting outward show for spiritual sincerity; but the philosopher who knows the close connexion between the different faculties of the mind, and who views religion as a solace rather than as an object of terror, will take more liberal views of institutions which once gave laws to the whole, and which now are venerated in three fourths of civilized Europe-institutions which were dictated by the sound and irrefragable policy of the early saints and fathers of the church; who have left in their venerable writings traces of the most profound and extensive knowledge of the human heart, and who, by the control that they obtained over the conduct of men during the most barbarous ages of the world, proved, what even heathen philosophy taught of old, that Omne tulit punctum qui miseuit utile dulci, in other words,