A dark and sad melancholy grows over us; we shun the face of man; we wrap ourselves in our thoughts like silkworms; we mutter fag-ends of dismal songs; tears come into our eyes; we recall all the misfortunes that have ever happened to us; we stoop in our gait, and bury our hands in our breeches-pockets; we say, 'What is life ?--a stone to be shied into a horsepond!' We pine for some congenial heart, and have an itching desire to talk prodigiously about ourselves; all other subjects seem weary, stale, and unprofitable.

We feel as if a fly could knock us down, and are in a humour to fall in love, and make a very sad piece of business of it.

Yet with all this weakness we have at these moments a finer opinion of ourselves than we ever had before.

We call our megrims the melancholy of a sublime soul, the yearnings of an indigestion we denominate yearnings after immortality, nay, sometimes 'a proof of the nature of the soul!' May I find some biographer who understands such sensations well, and may he style those melting emotions the offspring of the poetical character,' which, in reality, are the offspring of--a mutton-chop!" [Vide Moore's "Life of Byron," in which it is satisfactorily shown that if a man fast forty-eight hours, then eat three lobsters, and drink Heaven knows how many bottles of claret; if, when he wake the next morning, he sees himself abused as a demon by half the periodicals of the country,--if, in a word, he be broken in his health, irregular in his habits, unfortunate in his affairs, unhappy in his home, and if then he should be so extremely eccentric as to be low-spirited and misanthropical, the low spirits and the misanthropy are by no means to be attributed to the above agreeable circumstances, but, God wot, to the "poetical character"!] "You jest pleasantly enough on your low spirits," said Clifford; "but I have a cause for mine." "What then ?" cried Tomlinson.

"So much the easier is it to cure them.
The mind can cure the evils that spring from the mind.