he should return by four
o'clock on that day. Mr. Anson did not return till five, and found, by the
countenances of the domestics, that the deed was done. He went into his
chamber and found the corpse of his friend leaning over the arm of a great
chair, with the pistol on the ground by him, the ball of which had been
discharged into the roof of his mouth, and passed into his brain.

Mr. ---- and Mr. ----, two young men, heirs to considerable fortunes, shot
themselves at the age of four or five and twenty, without their friends
being able to conjecture any cause for those rash actions. One of them I
had long known to express himself with dissatisfaction of the world; at
eighteen years of age he complained, that he could not entertain himself;
he tried to study the law at Cambridge, and afterwards went abroad for a
year or two by my advice; but returned dissatisfied with all things. As he
had had an eruption for some years on a part of his face, which he probably
endeavoured to remove by external applications; I was induced to ascribe
his perpetual ennui to the pain or disagreeable sensation of a diseased
liver. The other young gentleman shot himself in his bed-room, and I was
informed that there was found written on a scrap of paper on his table, "I
am impotent, and therefore not fit to live." From whence there was reason
to conclude, that this was the hallucinatio maniacalis, the delirious idea,
which caused him to destroy himself. The case therefore belongs to mania
mutabilis, and not to taedium vitae.

M. M. Some restraint in exhausting the usual pleasures of the world early
in life. The agreeable cares of a matrimonial life. The cultivation of
science, as of chemistry, natural philosophy, natural history, which
supplies an inexhaustible source of pleasurable novelty, and relieves ennui
by the exertions it occasions.

In many of these cases, whence irksomeness of life has been the ostensible
cause of suicide, there has probably existed a maniacal hallucination, a
painful idea, which the patient has concealed even to his dying hour;
except where the mania has evidently arisen from hereditary or acquired
disease of the membranous or glandular parts of the system.

12. _Pulchritudinis desiderium._ The loss of beauty, either by disease, as
by the small-pox, or by age, as life advances, is sometimes painfully felt
by ladies, who have been much flattered on account of it. There is a
curious case of this kind related in L