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In this brief observation is concentrated all the knowledge that is to be gathered from books on the subject of the literary malady, as indigestion may be pre-eminently called. There is not a word of it which demands not the most serious attention from every individual who is employed in literary pursuits; he may gather from it that excess in wine is not the only intemperance; but that excessive application to studious habits is another kind of intemperance no less injurious to the constitution than the former.

Burns wrestled with his disorder in want and wretchedness till October 1795; about which time he was seized with his last illness—a rheumatic fever. The fever, it appears, was the effect of cold caught in returning from a tavern benumbed and intoxicated. His appetite from the first attack failed him, his hands shook, and his voice trembled on any exertion or emotion. His pulse became weaker and more rapid, and pain in the larger joints, and hands, and feet, deprived him of the enjoyment of refreshing sleep. Too much dejected in his spirits, and too well aware of his real situation to entertain hopes of recovery, he was ever musing on the approaching desolation of his family, and his spirits sunk into a uniform gloom. In June he was recommended to go into the country, "and impatient of medical advice," says his biographer," as well as every species of control, he determined for himself to try the effects of bathing in the sea." Burns, however, distinctly says in two of his letters, this extraordinary remedy for rheumatism was prescribed by his physician; "The medical men," he wrote to Mr. Cunningham, “tell me that my last and only chance is bathing and country quarters, and riding."

For the sake of the faculty, I trust that Burns was

mistaken in the matter, for no medical man of common sense could think that a patient sinking under rheumatism, and shattered in constitution, was a fit subject for so violent a remedy as the cold bath. No medical man can consider, without shuddering, the mischief it must have produced in the case of Burns. At first he imagined that the bathing was of service; the pains in his limbs were relieved, but this was immediately followed by a new attack of fever, as well might have been expected, and when he returned to his own house in Dumfries on the 18th of July he was no longer able to stand upright. At this time a tremour pervaded his frame; his tongue was parched, and his mind sunk into delirium, when not roused by conversation. On the 2d and 3d day the fever increased, and his strength diminished. On the 10th the sufferings of this great but ill-fated genius were terminated, and a life was closed in which virtue and passion had been at perpetual variance.

Thus perished Burns in his thirty-seventh year. Let those who are without follies cast the first stone at his infirmities, and thank their God they are not like the other poor children of genius, frail in health, feeble in resolution, in small matters improvident, aud unfortunate in most things.*

* Strikingly speaking, perhaps, no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and altogether private individual, with means apparently the humblest.-Ed.

CHAPTER XXII.

COWPER.

A few centuries ago, the clergy were entrusted with the care of the health of the community, either because the healing art was held in such respect, that it was derogatory to its dignity to suffer laymen to perform the high duties of so noble a profession, or because the lucrative nature of a medical monopoly was as well understood by the church in the dark ages, as it is by the college in these enlightened times. The faculty, however, flourished in the cloister, and the learned monk and the skilful leech were one and the same person. A great deal of good, and no doubt a certain quantity of evil resulted from the combination of the two vocations: of the good, it is sufficient to remember that the clergy acquired a two-fold claim to the gratitude, and also to the generosity, of the public; of the evil, we need only reflect on the extent of the influence conjoined of the priest and the physician-to tremble at the power as well as at the result of their coalition. We know not, however, whether this evil may not have been counterbalanced, in some degree, by the advantage of the superior opportunities afforded the medical divine, of distinguishing the nature of moral maladies combined with physical, or confounded with them; and of discovering the source of those anomalies in both, which puzzle the separate consideration of the doctor, and the divine. Plato, indeed, says that

"all the diseases of the body proceed from the soul;" if such were the case, physic should prefer the service of theology to the ministry of nature. But the quaintest of authors, and at the same time most orthodox of churchmen, dissents from the opinion of the philosopher. “Surely," he says, "if the body brought an action against the soul, the soul would certainly be cast and convicted, that, by her supine negligence, had caused such inconvenience, having authority over the body." Be this as it may, Time, the oldest radical, who revolutionises all things, has remodeled the constitution of physic; the divine has ceased to be a doctor; and Taste, no less innovatory than Time, has divested the former of his cowl, and the latter of his wig: but science, it is to be hoped, has gained by the division of its labour, as well as by the change of its costume.

We had however, almost forgotten the point to which we meant our observations to apply.

Cowper's malady being connected with certain delusions on the subject of religion, the attention of serious people has been very much called to his history, and the result has been, that most of the biographical details and memoirs of him, have been written by clergymen. Hayley's "Life" is an exception, and a recent one by Taylor, which, in a religious point of view, is unexceptionable. But its fault, like that of all the others of its class, is, that while the character of Cowper is tried by all the tests that morality can apply to it, the specific malady which occasioned or influenced his hallucinations is left unnoticed; and the mystery of his religious despondency is still invoved in the same obscurity in which they found it. They have looked upon his gloom as a supernatural visitation, and not a human infirmity, which was expli

cable on any known principle of medical science. One of them has even hinted at the impiety of referring his religious gloom to any physical peculiarity. The consequence is, that Cowper's fate has not even the advantage of furnishing a salutary example of melancholy, exasperated into mania, partly by the concurrence of unpropitious circumstances, but still more by the indulgence of its victim in the errors of those "anatomists in piety who destroy all the freshness of religion by immuring themselves in the infected atmosphere of their own enthusiasm."

The object of the following observations is to point out the peculiar character of his malady, and to show how far his mental aberrations were caused or encouraged by religious enthusiasm. It will be necessary to take a brief view of his unhappy carcer, and to give a short transcript of those passages in his history which are wound up with the consideration of his infirmities. But previously it behoves us to be in a condition to be able to pronounce an opinion on the nature of his disorder; and for this purpose we need only refer to the summary character of the phenomena of mania. Our enquiry extends not beyond the general knowledge of the subject that is to be found in the common definitions of the disorder. In a medical point of view we have little to do with it; our business is with the character of Cowper, and not with the history of a disease.

Insanity, according to Locke, is a preternatural fervour of the imagination, not altogether destructive of the reasoning powers, but producing wrongly combined ideas, and making right deductions from wrong data: while idiotcy can neither distinguish, compare, or abstract, general ideas. And "herein lies the difference between idiots and madmen-that madmen put wrong ideas to

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