'pleasant and cheerful society.' This, be it known, is
no chance collocation of words set down at random; it is a _bona fide_
technical--as much so as the hardest Greek compound that ever floored
an apothecary. 'Pleasant and cheerful society!' they speak of it as
they would of the latest improvement in chemistry or the last patent
medicine--a thing to be had for asking for, like opodeldoc or Morison's
pills. A line of treatment is prescribed for you, winding up in this
one principle; and your physician, as he shakes your hand and says
'good-bye,' seems like an angel of benevolence, who, instead of
consigning you to the horrors of the pharmacopoeia and a sick-bed, tells
you to pack off to the Rhine, spend your summer at Ems or Wiesbaden,
and, above all things, keep early hours, and 'pleasant, cheerful
society.'

Oh, why has no martyr to the miseries of a 'liver' or the sorrows of
'nerves' ever asked his M.D. where--where is this delightful intercourse
to be found? or by what universal principle of application can the
same tone of society please the mirthful and the melancholy, the man
of depressed, desponding habit, and the man of sanguine, hopeful
temperament? How can the indolent and lethargic soul be made to derive
pleasure from the hustling energies of more excited natures, or the
fidgety victim of instability sympathise with the delights of quiet and
tranquillity? He who enjoys 'rude health'--the phrase must have been
invented by a fashionable physician; none other could have deemed such
a possession an offensive quality--may very well amuse himself by the
oddities and eccentricities of his fellow-men, so ludicrously exhibited
_en scene_ before him. But in what way will these things appear to the
individual with an ailing body and a distempered brain? It is impossible
that contrarieties of temperament would ever draw men into close
intimacy during illness. The very nature of a sick man's temper is to
undervalue all sufferings save his own and those resembling his. The
victim of obesity has no sympathies with the martyr to atrophy; he
may envy, he cannot pity him. The man who cannot eat surely has little
compassion for the woes of him who has the 'wolf,' and must be muzzled
at meal times. The result, then, is obvious. The gloomy men get
together in groups, and croak in concert; each mind brings its share of
affliction to the common fund, and they form a joint-stock company
of misery that rapidly assists their progres