in those of a studious and meditative turn, is as often the result of self-conceit as of humility. Generally, both causes operate. Commerce with the world will remove or modify at once the causes and effect. Humility before God in the presence of eternal truth and the contemplation of spiritual holiness, is one of the best virtues of the human heart. Humility before man is but a species of abjectness, not always quite contemptible, but still a lamentable blemish. Possibly the world is but giving a beneficial lesson when it ruthlessly over-rides the prostrate soul. If experience of life teaches anything, it teaches self-reliance, and self-reliance implies self-respect. Newton compared himself to a child picking up on the ocean-shore of truth a few prettier pebbles than the rest. That was humility of the right sort. The great philosopher did not compare himself to a child amongst men, for he knew his gifts. Nothing can be more incorrect than to suppose that because a man of ability is conscious of his power, he is necessarily self-conceited. One who underrates his mental or physical endowments, is but unthankfully humble. Nor does the world exact this, but only that he recollect he is a member of a community of individuals possessing rights and feelings similar to his own, and demean himself accordingly. Let him respect his fellows, and they will respect him. He must not attempt to raise himself by depressing others, denying their merits, humbling their little pomposities, rudely exposing their harmless foibles, and concealing or justifying his If he is exalted by such means, the world will be against him. I think that men of letters of former days had themselves to blame in great measure for their somewhat ungenial reception by the public. They were too fond of contemning the ordinary pursuits and ambitions of mankind, and seemed to imagine that all wisdom could be put up in type, wherein they were mightily mistaken.

own.

By the time Dame Experience has taught our novice to know his place, it is likely that a great many angularities of his character will be worn down. During the process of abrasure, he will have experienced some inconvenience and annoyance; but it will not be the worse for him in the end. The curry-comb may be a little unpleasant to Bucephalus, a steed of mettle, but his coat will be all the more sleek and shining for its use. It is not necessary or proper to yield up all individuality of character. Mankind are not intended to be rubbed together till their characters are rounded and uniform, like a box of shot, as some one says.

So far our friend will have been principally engaged in learning his relation to society. Another department of knowledge of the world which he must learn is the relation of others to him, and to one another. He will read a variety of characters, and see the working of complex passions, instincts, and aspirations; he will grow expert in interpreting motives by actions, and guiding his own conduct accordingly. Unless he is placed in peculiar circumstances, it will be forcibly impressed upon him that, what are called the institutions, customs, and etiquette of society, are not to be lightly set at naught. I daresay he will set out with an intense hatred and contempt of shams; probably he will begin by indiscriminate denunciation and persistent avoidance of everything which seems otherwise than it is. But in time it will be found expedient to divide shams into two classes-the excusable, and the inexcusable-the latter, all noble instincts will combine to condemn; the former, it will be best, morally and socially, to yield to. We must not always proclaim the whole truth within us on the house-tops, albeit our soul disdains a lie; it will not do always to let a person know our estimate of him: one has to be polite to fools and knaves.

There is a net-work of social formalism curiously

contrived, and in which a social being feels himself uncomfortably entangled. He exclaims with the laureate:

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest nature's

rule!

But let him take care to conform. I think, on reflection, a certain philosophical reasonableness may be discerned in some of them. It is very well to attempt to reform social institutions, to soften down 'social tyrannies,' but the advantage of refusing allegiance to them point-blank, is greatly outbalanced by the disadvantage. In all probability, for one kindred spirit that hails the brave innovator, a dozen seasonable and pleasant friends will be lost to him. Society has with one accord pronounced that, on some occasions, it is befitting to seem pleased when one is not pleased; to keep down at the bottom of the heart personal misery, and wear a cheerful mask; to withhold your real sentiments, and substitute evasive commonplaces. One can easily, of course, admit that in extreme circumstances, or when a selfish motive prevails, this sort of behaviour is little less than hypocrisy; yet all these things must be done on some occasions; and where to draw the line, must be left to individual discretion. But it is not sufficient,' says that acute and rigid moralist Pascal, that we state only what is the truth; we are bound also not, at all times, to say all that is true; because we ought only to give publicity to things that may serve a useful purpose, and not to such as may cause pain to individuals without conducing to general utility.' This, of course, applies to the conduct of life, as well as of an argument. You meet, we will say, an acquaintance, whose conversation is the reverse of acceptable-in short, he is a bore

nevertheless, the world enjoins you to receive him pleasantly, and get rid of him with gentleness. You are thrown, suppose, into a cheerful society engaged in 'pleasaunce,' as the old writers have it; a great grief is gnawing at your heart; nevertheless, you gulp down your sighs, and do as little as may be to remind your companions that man is born to trouble. A friend introduces you to a stranger; you find him, on acquaintance, coarse, vain, and frivolous-briefly, a Goth. Some time after, your friend casually, and rather imprudently, asks you what you think of your new acquaintance; are you at once to proclaim that you consider him a Goth? It may happen that a friend of your family feels it a duty to take notice of you, and invites you to a Sunday dinner; you hate Sunday dinners, except at home, and don't much relish being taken notice of patronisingly; nevertheless, you cannot well say so, and therefore you go, and force yourself to be entertaining.

These crampings of the soul are no doubt unpleasant, yet I think I see in them something which gives them a kind of dignity. By men in business espe cially, a due regard to the exigencies of conventionalism must be paid. In the private circle, a man's character becomes well known, and allowance is often made for idiosyncrasies; but in business, the intercourse with his fellows is so limited, that no interest arises sufficient to counterbalance primâ facie disagreeableness. Men in professions and trade therefore find it necessary to court the good-will of others by strict attention to their feelings, carefully avoiding sore places, and keeping their esoteric opinions to themselves. There are a class of persons, however, who make a point of speaking their minds, as they term it. Generally, these individuals lash the vices of the age and the crotchets of their neighbours with such a gusto, that one cannot help believing the genius of ill-feeling, and not enlightened satire, prompts their diatribes. They imagine themselves to be bravely independent, when they are only brusque. Of course, it must be admitted that many conventionalisms are

If

nuisances, but not all. We are a little too apt to rebel against harmless, nay, beneficial formalism. What do we observe in descending the scale of society? Do we not find that feelings are ruffled by frequent and gross personalities? Wit, humour, moral counsel, and intellectual discussion-all become personal. You find practical jokers in abundance, open mockery of personal defects, merriment at personal annoyances. Impudence is the only safeguard. Men vex one another with a relish. Friendship loses its delicate flavour, and even virtuous. love is deprived of much of its refinement. For my part, I esteem social tyrannies better than social anarchy. Let us be patient. need be, agitate constitutionally in the social parliament, and bring in a social reform bill; but in the meantime we must respect, so far as conscience will permit, the powers that be-pay morning calls, talk tittle-tattle at tea-tables, discourse vigorously on things indifferent, smile when we are ennuied, and be thankful to the man who introduced the weather as neutral ground of converse. In short, we must indulge in a little innocent conformity, until we can emigrate to arcadian groves and utopian cities, or dwell in them at home, or cease to be gregarious. I have said that there seems to be a certain reasonableness in social forms; they may be regarded as so many fences artificially raised to protect us from rude collision with the prejudices and self-esteem of others. Many, no doubt, have almost survived their usefulness, or at least have become so stiff and antiquated as to excite ridicule and occasion annoyance; but in default of a revised code, they can hardly be dispensed with. If all men were equally refined and considerate, the proprieties of life would suggest themselves spontaneously. There is always a class of people, however, who are guided more correctly by external regulations than by innate sensibilities; and there is always another class ready to attach too much importance to rigid etiquette, and live according to the letter rather than the spirit of the law. These are the people who convert wholesome rules into tyrannical restraints, and hinder social pleasures by the very means intended to enhance them.

Although it is perhaps expedient to fall in with the manners and customs we find existing around us, we must not infer that it is inexpedient to enter a protest now and then against any portion of the shoe that pinches unduly. It is a Briton's privilege to grumble. After all, how have we gained our political liberties but by grumbling; and it may be that our social liberties shall be gained and protected by a similar process. Her Majesty's Opposition is an embodied grumble. By all means, let the principle be extended to the realm of social conventionalism.

THE FIELD' OF YORE. THE days of chivalry are gone-in re venaticâ, as well as in re militari. We do not carry things on with the heartiness of our fathers. With the war-part of the question this reminiscence has little to do, though it sends me back to the time when the old Post-office yard in College Green rang with the exultant cries of news-boys, announcing the escape of Napoleon Bonaparte from Elba in a third edition of the Correspondent Post. I can still see with my mind's eye young Mansfield, the son of an English judge, in his gay hussar uniform, gazing with pleased astonishment at the great fact, on the placard over against King William; while an apple-woman clapped him on the shoulder, and looking up into his handsome face exclaimed: There, yer sowle! your thrade's alive yet.' That was more than he was himself in three months after.

I can still recall the venerable head and dark sparkling eyes of old Dana, colonel of the Highland Watch,

as he related how, in the same moment, his two palms had been perforated in one of the peninsular fights; but whether by one and the same bullet, or by two, he never could tell. All he could vouch for was, that if his hands did happen to be clasped together at the time, he was na prayin'. Let us hope that he could not have said the same thing on the 18th of June following, when he fell at the head of his gallant corps, and his white hairs swept the dust. Such things seem to belong to yesterday, so much fresher are they in the memory, which was then young, than any modern instance.

But our affair, good reader, is with the departed glories of the chase. We mourn the palmy state of the Northern Rangers, with that fine old sportsman, Lord Roden, crossing the country from Slieve Donard to the Fews without a check. No sneaking, bellowing, broken-winded hack of an agitator had a chance of coming within a view hollow of him. The present earl-alas, quantum mutatus ab illo !-could not have led the field after the manner of his sire, if he had ever so great a mind, for he must have always ridden fourteen stone. But, at all events, their tastes lay in an opposite direction.

Yet we must not disparage the heavy weights, remembering how many of the most eminent foxhunters of the age could have made an archbishop kick the beam. Who, having seen, can ever forget Sir Henry Parnell, tall, portly, and stout as a quartermaster of the Life Guards? King George had not a handsomer or a better-fed member of parliament in his majesty's Opposition, or one who could ride to hounds with more thorough judgment; the right man in the right place always. I speak of those years in which the Kildare Club and the Queen's County Club were wont to rendezvous for a fortnight together, after Christmas, in some border town; and every day (Sundays excepted), one or other of their packs broke cover in the neighbourhood.

'Them was the times!' as poor old Harry Lewis used to say, when every stable and shed for miles around was in requisition; for the modern economical system of equipping a fox-hunter out of a tailor's shop was as yet unknown. Nobody had then heard of one horse and two red coats for an outfit.

Every sportsman who pretended to do the thing in fast style kept a stud. Conolly of the Black Pits-I believe his father saved bacon-had four hunters, besides hacks, always at hand. Farrell, another man of business, had half a dozen. The country gentlemen went about it with less pretension; but they were all unexceptionably mounted, and in sufficient force to be able to take their own place and keep it without distressing their cattle.

Sir Henry Parnell, however, was seldom seen among them apart from his gray steed. Of course, he did not go out every day; but thrice a week we never missed him from the 'customed brake.' When the chase began, he fell into his place without effort or display, went quietly along, taking no heed of those who dashed by him in their new ardour; and though he seemed, like Miss Edgeworth's racer, 'Little Botherem,' to be 'driving all before him,' instead of shewing them the way, he still kept his game in view In the longest run, whoever could catch a sight of the dogs, was sure to descry the gallant gray and his portly rider in the same coup d'œil. If Conolly, or any other of the fast uns, descended from his breathless steed to vault into a cool saddle, Sir Henry generally trotted past with an observation on the appearance of the green wheat, or the state of the fences, to which the other could only gasp a reply; and when the fox was killed or run aground, the honourable member for Queen's County was seen to ride away out of the field with his placid smile, leaving younger and more impulsive sportsmen to discuss the incidents and

fluctuations of the pursuit. He was the most remarkable living example in those days of the value of the maxim, festina lente, for he literally seemed to walk into' the flying foe, whilst others were breaking their necks and foundering their horses to overtake him.

An element in those reunions, which it might be improper to say we now desiderate, though certainly we have it not, was the clerical fox-hunter. It is the pleasure of modern reformers, both political and religious, to lay all the vices and deficiencies of the Protestant Church establishment in Ireland at the door of those of its clergy who in days past amused themselves with field-sports. It is no personal concern of mine to defend them. I never jumped a potatotrench in my life. Any man might easily be better employed; à fortiori, any clergyman. But there is too great a disposition to make a scapegoat of the sporting parson, to the plenary absolution of every other ordained offender. The great aversion and dislike with which the Church establishment has long been regarded by our Roman Catholic population, can be traced but in a very small degree to the amusements of its clergy. We should seek the cause rather, as far as personal influences have had any effect in producing it, in the tithe-system, now happily extinct, and in the pertinacity and rigour with which, in bygone times, many individuals of the order asserted what they considered their rights. The law of tithes, in all cases, imposed an odious necessity, which in many was rendered more odious by the extreme severity of its enforcement. That cause repelled thousands from the church door, who would not have turned away from the frank and cordial, though perhaps too worldly, urbanity of the clerical sportsman. Nor would it be correct to say that clergymen of that class were, in the times we speak of, necessarily careless in their office, or indifferent as to the performance of its duties. Allowance must be made for the varying habits and customs of society. The world has become more staid and orderly, in outward deportment, since the Georgian era; and according to the sacred maxim, 'Like people like priest,' the manners of the clergy are no longer as unreserved as they were. There are men still living, and not much beyond the prime of life, who are an honour to the clerical profession, and whom I have known to partake heartily in the pleasures of the chase. Yet should you ask, Are they not now better and more effective ministers of the Gospel than they were then? I should hesitate before I replied to that question. Of course, they have done right to give up the favourite relaxation of their younger days. If they had clung to it in defiance of the altered feelings and opinions of society, they could hardly be deemed either wise or earnest members of their calling.

Yet the individuals to whom I allude were always much and deservedly esteemed in the Church; and their teaching was not considered at variance with their practice, because, in the intervals of parochial duty, they rode occasionally after the hounds. Sure I am that the other frequenters of the field were no worse for that association. Still less reason is there to suppose that they are better for its discontinuance. Young gentlemen, the sons of our gentry, did not then take the field with black pipes in their mouths and whisky-flasks in their coat-pockets; but they rode to the cover like gentlemen, and they returned after the day's sport in a proper moral condition to present themselves to the female members of the family, or occupy the hours which remained of the day in reading or business.

Honest Nat Smith-peace to the memory of a man of worth!-was a fox-hunting parson; that is to say, he rode his one horse occasionally after the Emo Pack, and enjoyed the amusement while it lasted. But he was an earnest and diligent pastor, who neglected no duty

in order to follow this pastime. On the contrary, the fine health and animal spirits to which it conduced, seemed only to render him more energetic and active in the performance of all his clerical functions. His bishop, a first-rate equestrian himself, though I cannot say that he ever sported the shovel-hat across the country, was out on a tour of inspection through the diocese, and had sent orders to Nat to attend upon him at his church. But the curate thought himself bound to do the full honours of the parish to his commanding officer. Instead, therefore, of waiting in band and surplice, to receive him at the gate, he mounted the old bay, and met his lordship, as a high-sheriff meets a judge, at the bounds of his jurisdiction.

The bishop came cantering on a noble iron-gray, of which kind he always kept the most perfect stud in the church, and haughtily waving his hand to the curate's humble salutation, rather accelerated than checked his speed, as he passed on. But Nat was not to be thrown out in such a race. He knew his distance well enough, and therefore did not venture to make it a neck-and-neck affair. Still, withal, he would not be left to ride along with the groom, but kept the bay well in hand, close upon his lordship's crupper, yet a little at one side. After a rasping gallop over two or three breathing hills, the bishop saw that the thing was not to be done-for he had evidently purposed to get to the church before the parson could be there to receive him—and so he condescended to pull up and enter into a colloquy over his left shoulder.

'I suppose, sir,' his lordship observed interrogatively, you hunt all the week, and ride a steeple-chase on Sundays?'

'I seldom go beyond the pace we have been keeping just now, my lord,' replied Nat; 'for, indeed, no one nag could stand it.'

This was enough for the dignitary; and as such men, when they have any spark of manly generosity in their character, always admire the independence which temperately asserts itself, he ever afterwards accosted Nat with unusual courtesy. But he gave him nothing. My poor friend lived and died a curate; that, however, seemed to give him little concern, for he had means sufficient to supply his simple wants, and a surplus besides, for the indulgence of a benevolent and hospitable nature. 'What more need I wish for?' he would say, 'without chick or child; unless, indeed, it were the position which even a nominal preferment would give me in the eyes of others; and that, I own, would gratify me in my old days. But it cannot be helped; and while they, who know me best, think well of me, it can be easily endured.'

'But, Nat, my friend,' I asked, 'how comes it that you are arrived at this time of life without a family around you? you who are endowed with so many social and domestic virtues, and would have so enlivened the hearth by your pleasant temper and good spirits; why did you never marry?'

'Ah, don't ask me that,' he answered with a droll gravity. The question reminds me of a great fright and a great escape. You know what an easy-tempered fellow I am; a butt for every one, in fact, like Falstaff; and how even now, with the snows of sixty above my brows, men of all sorts, and women too, "take a pride to gird at me." Striplings of twenty address me by my Christian name; and that, indeed, not in its entiretyas your modern revivers of old barbarisms say-but in its undignified monosyllabic abbreviation. It was the same thing always, and I should be an ungrateful wretch to complain of it; since it is to a sort of equivoque connected therewith, I feel now indebted for my free condition. I did once put the momentous question in a fit of heedless desperation at a slight, fancied or imaginary, from one to whom the poor heart would fain have proposed it, but dared not. In the moment of rankling disappointment, a young

'Courageous, sir? It was rash; it was desperate! The words had scarcely passed the fence of my teeth, when I was seized with a tremor, and would have given my best horse-for at that time I had two, a Sunday hack, and one for work, you know-to recall them.'

'But her answer, Nat-her answer?'

'Oh, that was short, sharp, and decisive. She could not speak at first for laughing; for she was a giggling thing, and if you will pardon my vanity-I think the joy and surprise set her off on this occasion more than usual. But the answer was not long a-coming.' 'And what was it?'

'I will, Nat!'

'Why, man, that was an acceptance.'

'So you may think, sir; but I received it in another sense; for, Heaven bless her, she was a Dublin girl, and gave out her syllables with the peculiar tone and twang of that sweet city, where they call Tom, Tam; and George, Jarge.'

'And I suppose you will say not-nat.'

'Of course: and so did I construe it.'

'O recreant knight,

Have you not heard it said full oft,

A woman's nay doth stand for naught?'

'Yes; so I have been told, and I partly believe it; but in my bachelor's vocabulary, a woman's nat doth stand for nay, and to that reading I nailed her.'

'And how did you convey your interpretation?' 'Simply by looking very disappointed; asking pardon for my presumption, and saying: "Since you will not-you may be sure I emphasised the o-there is no more to be said."'

'Cruel Nat! Pray, how did she take that sting?' 'Why, she laughed again, but not quite so boisterously as before; and ever after she called me Mr Smith when she spoke to me; leaving no room, had I repeated the question, for mistaking her meaning. I must add,' he concluded with a chuckle, and let it be a lesson to you, my young friend, how you put questions that lady is still alive, and the mother of twelve children!'

Our theological chapter would be imperfect without the priest. Few complete 'meets' wanted that feature; and a fine broad one it was, unlike the whey-faced species which ultramontane asceticism is introducing apace into our rural economy, contrary to good-fellowship of every kind, and very much against the peace of our sovereign lady the Queen. If the foxhunting parson was commonly a fourteen-stunner, the fox-hunting priest was equal to that at least. He was to be distinguished by his rotundity of jowl-so large, as to justify the wit of the Maynooth barber, who proposed to take a contract for shaving the whole college by the acre-and so hard and red, that nothing, in these degenerate days, can be its parallel, if it be not one of Mrs Fleming's 'cherry-coloured hams.' By that and the tan boot-tops, surmounted not unfrequently by drab unmentionables, P. P. might be picked out of ten thousand.

Dr Doyle (J. K. L.) had not yet put his interdict upon the chase, nor, with terrible hospitality, sweated down the big proportions of his clergy by the periodical festivities of a Retreat; but he had begun to look askance at their uncircumscribed dimensions, and hinted a desire to be surrounded by boon-companions the very opposite to the taste of Julius Cæsar; for whereas that old Roman wished to have men about him who

were fat,' Cassius himself could not be too lean for the lenten convivialities of Braganza Hall.*

It is considered orthodox when an agreeable bishop meets his clergy in conference or at a visitation, that he should provide a repast for them, and in every way manifest a lively interest in their good case. I have known an archdeacon at the primate's dinner in Drogheda, acting, of course by authority, to rate the neglect of the caterer, who had failed to provide a salmon, with as much severity as if he had committed a breach of the Thirty-nine Articles. 'Sir,' he said, you might as well leave out the Athanasian Creed on Easter Sunday, as omit a Boyne salmon from the visitation-dinner of this loyal diocese.'

But our starch prelate of Salamanca, far from caring for the good cheer of his priests, or betraying the least satisfaction at their jolly condition, sometimes began his allocution with some such phrase as- My reverend brethren, I am grieved and scandalised to see you grown so fat. Father Martin, that ruddy complexion ill becomes you. Mr Keogh, you must endeavour to grow less muscular, or you will never rise in the Church.'

One of the divines so reproved was a sporting curate, who, long after a positive prohibition against the chase was issued, found a way to follow his favourite amusement, whilst his obedience to his spiritual master moulted no feather. This was managed with nice address. He usually had two or three parochial calls of no pressing urgency, on a hunting morning; and they were arranged with such geographical tact, that whatever direction the game might take, there lay the path of his reverence's duty. 'If he be a sporting fox,' he would say, 'he will make for Ballinakill; and it so happens, more by chance than good-luck, that a very old woman has sent me a message by her grandchild that she would be glad to see me some fine morning. She lives close by the wood there; and a finer morning surely for going to see the poor old lady than a southerly wind and a cloudy sky give earnest of, neither she nor I need expect at the season of the year. Well, then, the shortest way, next to that which the bird flies, is the way a dog-fox, when in good wind, takes towards the place he desires to reach without the least possible delay. Away I go then, the shortest road, over field and fallow, hedge and ditch, for Ballinakill; but if at the same time a pack of dogs happen to be running after a wild baste in the very same direction, how can I help that? Nihil occurrit ecclesia. No hinderance or obstruction is to retard the march of the church. The bishop himself, no, nor the pope, would not have me go round.'

Thus, in whatever point of the compass the scent lay and the game broke away, in that line of duty Father Festus had a call, and he never neglected it as long as he had a horse to carry him. Peace be with his ashes; he was a hearty, kind, and worthy man. I wish his mother, the Church of Rome, had in this land a thousand anointed sons of the same tastes and the same temper. Her present progeny, what are they like-prowling about everywhere with their eyes looking in all directions except in the faces of honest men-but a pack of poachers?

If the fox is now doomed to die without benefit of clergy, it may be some compensation that his last run is seldom uncheered by the presence of the softer sex. The meet, if not the finish, is beautified by an imposing concourse, or, as Bob Blake happily malaprops it, an imposing conquest of spinsters and their mammas, such as our ancestors never were wont to behold in that situation. The full, practical extent

late General Sir Dudley Hill, and purchased from him as a residence Braganza House, built in the neighbourhood of Carlow by the for the Roman Catholic bishops of Kildare and Leighlin.

The dogs began to bark,

And I went out for to see;

A prattie young man came a-hunting,
But he was na hunting for me.

Oh, what 'll become of me?
Oh, what shall I do?

There's naebody comin' to marry me;
Naebody comin' to woo!

But this won't do any longer. The prattie young maidens go a-hunting now-a-days on their own hook. Equipages are congregated at the wood-side, and when the dogs throw off, and some old sportsman would fain lose no time in getting upon their track, too often Mrs Quigly's jaunting-car stops the gap, or the four Miss Kildarbies, in their one-horse fly, trot across his path, mocking the air with colours idly spread. On such occasions, Irish politeness is put to the very pin of its collar to acknowledge that the right women are always in the right place.

Yet there is something extremely diverting in the ardour with which the fair ones follow the game, especially those matrons who have olive plants to dispose of. How they do whip over highways and byways, in the hope of falling in with the red-coats again; and how skilfully they make their casts towards the most likely places for such chance rencontres!

The Donnybrook road on the 'walking Sunday' was the sight of all sights, with its triple row of cars laden with beauty in its flashiest attire; but it may be questioned if the pace of that renowned celebration could at all compare with the speed of barouches, phaetons, and jarvies, which transfer their delicate freights, on any hunting morning, from one cover towards another, in the hope of crossing upon the fox's path in his flight.

It is strange that fair young creatures should take such an interest in that amusement; and stranger still, how the materfamilias, whose bones one might almost hear rattling in the rugged transit, affects a superwomanly delight in it. With her, such a forenoon's avocation is surely the pursuit of sons-in-law under difficulties.

MODERN LEPROSY.

a

THE great diseases of the middle ages, such as the sweating sickness, the various forms of plague, the dancing mania, and other epidemics, have had this much in common, that, although they exhibited for a long period a disposition to break out afresh under favourable circumstances, they at length so completely disappeared, that mankind have come to regard them more in the light of medical curiosities than as great afflictions which devastated the most fertile and populous regions of the earth. There was, however, malady-endemic all over Europe from the tenth to the sixteenth century, not characterised, like epidemics, by rapidity of attack or excessive mortality, yet regarded, if possible, with still greater alarm. This disease, the leprosy, long supposed to have become extinct, has suddenly of late years assumed a fresh activity; and as many distinguished physicians maintain that a general outbreak is now imminent, some account of its nature, mode of development, and results, may not be uninteresting.

The old leprosy, made familiar to us from the important position it occupies in the hygienic code of the Jews, prevailed for more than 500 years on the continent of Europe, in Great Britain, and in Ireland. Its treatment forms rather an interesting chapter in the history of civilisation. In many countries, the unhappy subjects of the disease were looked upon with extreme aversion. Their affliction was considered the effect of an especial vengeance of God, for grievous

oftener than once, during the existence of a panic, attendant upon a violent epidemic, large numbers of helpless lepers, on a charge of having poisoned the wells, were barbarously put to death. In other countries, again, a treatment the very opposite was pursued. Kings thought it a privilege to wash their sores, and no gift was considered more expiatory of sin before Heaven, than bequeathing a munificent gift to a leper-hospital.

The condition of the leper, even in the most civilised countries, was extremely sad. In addition to the inconvenience of his loathsome and incurable malady, he was prevented using any means for his own support: such property as he might have owned was taken from him; the law classed him with idiots and lunatics; and a belief in the contagious nature of his malady, led to his perpetual seclusion. The hospitals or leper-houses provided for their retreat were very numerous; there was scarcely a town of any size without an establishment of this sort. Some, richly endowed, were exclusively devoted to the leprous, and placed under the jurisdiction of special officers; others, again, were attached to monasteries, and subject to ecclesiastical supervision. Lazar-houses of both kinds abounded in Scotland: there was one at Aldneston, in Lauderdale, superintended by the monks of Melrose; there were similar institutions at Elgin, Ayr, and Aberdeen; a leper-hospital was raised at Glasgow in the reign of King David II.; while one erected at Greenside, so late as 1589, for the benefit of the inhabitants of Edinburgh. These, as well as the large establishments in England and on the continent, fell gradually into disuse, and their revenues were appropriated to other charitable purposes, or not unfrequently seized upon by a rapacious court favourite.

was

Leprosy, however, as we have said, has begun to develop itself anew. It exists at this moment in different parts of the world, but is especially prevalent in the West Indies and in Norway. Out of the comparatively small population of Norway, there are upwards of 2000 lepers. Occasional cases make their appearance nearer home.

There are two varieties of the modern or existing disease-the tubercular, and the anaesthetic or joint form. The former is much more common, and unfortunately almost hopelessly incurable. It presents the most characteristic type of the disease, giving that painful appearance to the countenance which has in all ages made the hoar leprosy' so repulsive. The spots generally shew themselves first on the face, but by no means uniformly there. Their colour varies from a glistening white to a dark blue. As the disease advances, and the peculiar morbid deposit enters more extensively into the system, the beard, eyebrows, and eyelids fall out, the voice grows affected, and the sight becomes seriously impaired. These symptoms are constantly aggravated by depression of spirits, until at length, after the invasion of different important internal organs, death releases the sufferer. The average duration of this form of leprosy is about ten years-a prolongation of life we may probably ascribe to the immunity of the bones from the disease, au immunity that among other advantages permits mastication, and in consequence, so far leaves the function of digestion unimpaired.

The other, or anesthetic variety, affects the joints of the hands and feet, and is characterised by a numbness of those parts. Not unfrequently, if the disease be about to develop itself in the upper extremity, the patient complains of a cold feeling, extending from the elbow downwards. Wasting of the affected muscles ensues, and the patient becomes unable to put on a glove or to use a needle. The disease speedily attacks the osseous texture below, and a joint is often removed