s my lungs and throat. I more unwillingly visit the sick
in whom by love and duty I am interested, than those I care not for, to
whom I less look. I take possession of the disease I am concerned at,
and take it to myself. I do not at all wonder that fancy should give
fevers and sometimes kill such as allow it too much scope, and are too
willing to entertain it. Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time:
I remember, that happening one day at Toulouse to meet him at a rich old
fellow's house, who was troubled with weak lungs, and discoursing with
the patient about the method of his cure, he told him, that one thing
which would be very conducive to it, was to give me such occasion to be
pleased with his company, that I might come often to see him, by which
means, and by fixing his eyes upon the freshness of my complexion, and
his imagination upon the sprightliness and vigour that glowed in my
youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I
then was, his habit of body might, peradventure, be amended; but he
forgot to say that mine, at the same time, might be made worse. Gallus
Vibius so much bent his mind to find out the essence and motions of
madness, that, in the end, he himself went out of his wits, and to such a
degree, that he could never after recover his judgment, and might brag
that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through
fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being
unbound to have his pardon read to him, was found stark dead upon the
scaffold, by the stroke of imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale,
and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed,
feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes
to expiring. And boiling youth, when fast asleep, grows so warm with
fancy, as in a dream to satisfy amorous desires:--

"Ut, quasi transactis saepe omnibu rebu, profundant
Fluminis ingentes, fluctus, vestemque cruentent."

Although it be no new thing to see horns grown in a night on the forehead
of one that had none when he went to bed, notwithstanding, what befell
Cippus, King of Italy, is memorable; who having one day been a very
delighted spectator of a bullfight, and having all the night dreamed that
he had horns on his head, did, by the force of imagination, really cause
them to grow there. Passion gave to the son of Croesus the voice which
nature had denied hi