to take two bottles of port every day, or to take to angling,
or to give up smoking, or to work less or to work more, or to go to bed
early or to get up late, or to ride, or to fence, or to play golf, or to
go to Upper Egypt or the Engadine, or anything that fancy may dictate and
opportunity suggest. So the kind physician advises his mournful self-
tormentor, and then he himself flies round the corner and consults some
brother-healer about his own subjective gloom.

Old ladies, in speaking of the misdeeds of youth, are apt to recommend "a
good shaking" as a panacea. Really those victims of whom our
contemporary speaks, appear to be persons on whom "a good shaking,"
mental or physical, would produce a salutary effect. Cowardice, vanity,
overweening self-consciousness, are the causes of most melancholy. No
doubt it has physical causes too. Dr. Johnson suffered,--one of the best
and bravest of men. But most of us suffer--if suffer we do--because we
over-estimate ourselves and our own importance. Mr. Matthew Arnold has
tried to enforce this lesson. After a horrible murder in a railway
carriage, Mr. Arnold observed, with pain, the "almost bloodthirsty
clinging to life" of his fellow-passengers. In vain he pointed out to
them that even if they were to depart, "the great mundane movement" would
go on as usual. But they refused to be comforted. Every man was afraid
of meeting his own Muller; and as to the great mundane movement, no one
cared a pin. This selfishness is among the chief causes of melancholy. A
man persuades himself that he will not live long, or that his prospects
in this world or the next are gloomy; or he takes views as absurdly far-
reaching as those of the spinsters in the old tale, who wept over the
hypothetical fate of the child one of them might have had if she had been
married. Now, there is a certain melancholy not unbecoming a man;
indeed, to be without it is hardly to be human. Here we do find
ourselves, indeed, like the shipwrecked mariner on the isle of Pascal's
apologue; all around us are the unknown seas, all about us are the
indomitable and eternal processes of generation and corruption. "We come
like water, and like wind we go." Life is, indeed, as the great Persian
says--

"A moment's halt, a momentary taste
Of being from the well beside the waste."

These just causes of melancholy and of awe have presented themselves to
all reflective men at all times. They deeply affe