These studies came in time to have dreadful effects upon my nervous system; and I cannot read what I then wrote without some degree of horror, because it recalls to my mind the horrors that I have sometimes felt after passing a long evening in those severe studies." GOLDONI, after a rash exertion of writing sixteen plays in a year, confesses he paid the penalty of the folly.

He flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious vacuity.

To pass the day without doing anything, was all the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling.

But long after he said, "I felt at that time, and have ever since continued to feel, the consequence of that exhaustion of spirits I sustained in composing my sixteen comedies." The enthusiasm of study was experienced by POPE in his self-education, and once it clouded over his fine intellect.

It was the severity of his application which distorted his body; and he then partook of a calamity incidental to the family of genius, for he sunk into that state of exhaustion which SMOLLETT experienced during half a year, called a _coma vigil,_ an affection of the brain, where the principle of life is so reduced, that all external objects appear to be passing in a dream.
BOERHAAVE has related of himself, that having imprudently indulged in intense thought on a particular subject, he did not close his eyes for six weeks after; and TISSOT, in his work on the health of men of letters, abounds in similar cases, where a complete stupor has affected the unhappy student for a period of six months.
Assuredly the finest geniuses have not always the power to withdraw themselves from that intensely interesting train of ideas, which we have shown has not been removed from about them by even the violent stimuli of exterior objects; and the scenical illusion which then occurs, has been called the _hallucinatio studiosa,_ or false ideas in reverie.