d that barley-water goes well with
everything; if so, the epic is the exception which proves the rule.
Milton is tedious after rheumatic fever, Spencer is worse.

'"Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time,"'

murmurs the invalid, 'I can't stand them.' He does not mean anything
depreciatory, but merely that--

'Like strains of martial music
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavour,'

which he is not fit even to think of. He cannot read Keats's
'Nightingale,' but for quite another reason. What arouses 'thoughts too
deep for tears' in the hale and strong is to the sick as the sinking
for an artesian well. 'The Chelsea Waterworks,' as Mr. Samuel Weller
observed of Mr. Job Trotter (at a time when the metropolitan water
supply would seem to have been more satisfactory than at present), 'are
nothing to him.' On the other hand, Shelley's 'Skylark,' and the
'Dramatic Fragments' of Browning, are as cordials to the invalid, while
the poems of Walter Scott are like breezes from the mountains and the
sea. In that admirable essay, 'Life in the Sick-room,' the authoress
justly remarks, speaking of the advantage of objectivity in sick books,
'Nothing can be better in this view than Macaulay's "Lays," which carry
us at full speed out of ourselves.'

But it is not always that the invalid can read the poets at all; like
Mrs. Wititterley, his nerves are too delicately strung for the touch of
the muse. His chief enjoyment lies in fiction, to the producers of
which he can never feel too grateful. I remember, on one occasion when
I was very reduced indeed, taking up 'Northanger Abbey,' and reading,
with almost the same gusto as though I had been a novelist myself, Miss
Austen's defence of her profession. She says:

'I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common
with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the
very performances to the number of which they are themselves
adding, joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the
harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely even permitting them
to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally takes up
a novel, is sure to turn from its insipid pages with disgust. Let
us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our
productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected