of his attendant physician as well as of himself—the poor man's veto being as ineffectual at the dinner-table as that of Coleridge's hired overlookers at Bristol, when they, as in duty and by weekly wages bound, essayed to interpose between opium-eating S. T. C. and the chemists' shops. And many and many another glutton has to thank his own gluttony for bringing him to this pass-flannel wrappers, barley-water, and chalkstones. Did the world's Bills of Mortality tell the whole truth, many a gouty subject might there be written down felo-de-se. At the same time it should not be assumed, as by sweeping accusers it occasionally seems to be, that gout at once, and ipso facto, per se, absolutely and as a matter of course, stigmatises its victim as a free liver. Very moderate and abstemious men have been known to live and die gouty subjects. We shall see, directly, what Horace Walpole has to allege on this question. Meanwhile, an excerpt or two per contra, from the letters of Sydney Smith may not be unacceptable, as summing up the case for the prosecution,-Walpole remaining to be heard for the defence. To Lady Holland, in 1816, after expressing his concern to hear of her husband's gout, the jovial priest addresses himself thus: "I observe that gout loves ancestors and genealogy; it needs five or six generations of gentlemen or noblemen to give it its full vigour. Allen deserves the gout more than Lord Holland. I have seen the latter personage resorting occasionally to plain dishes, but Allen passionately loves complexity and artifice in his food." In 1831 we find Sydney "thanking God he has hitherto kept off that toe-consuming tyrant." Three years later, alas, he is "making a slow recovery; hardly yet able to walk across the room, or to put on a Christian shoe." "I ought to have the gout," says he, in 1835, "having been in the free use of French wines." Again: "I was last week on crutches with the gout, and it came into my eye" (1835). To bon-vivant Sir G. Philips in 1836: "I hope you have escaped gout this winter; it is in vain to hope you have not deserved it. I have had none, and deserved none." 66 I have had no gout, nor any symptom of it: by eating little, and drinking only water, I keep body and mind in a serene state, and spare the great toe." To Lady Carlisle in 1840: “What a very singular disease gout is! It seems as if the stomach fell down into the feet. The smallest deviation from right diet is immediately punished by limping and lameness, and the innocent ankle and blameless instep are tortured for the vices of the nobler organs. The stomach having found this easy way of getting rid of inconveniences, becomes cruelly despotic, and punishes for the least offences. A plum, a glass of champagne, excess in joy, excess in grief—any crime, however small, is sufficient for redness, swelling, spasms, and large shoes." And once more, in 1841, we find the witty canon telling Lady Grey that the gout is never far off, though not actually present with him, and that it is the only enemy he does not wish to have at his feet. 66 In Horace Walpole's instance, to which we come at last, it is observable that whenever, in his early letters, and before being himself victimised by the toe-consuming tyrant, he refers to a case of gout among kinsfolk or friends, he seems to take for granted that intemperate indulgence is, necessarily, at the bottom of the mischief. Pray what luxurious debauch has Mr. Chute been guilty of, that he is laid up with the gout?" "Mr. Chute [three years later] is out of town; when he returns, I shall set him upon your brother [laid up with the gout in his ankle] to reduce him to abstinence and health." But one dark November morning, in 1755, Horace Walpole wakes 1 up and finds himself-gouty. "Never was poor invulnerable immortality so soon brought to shame. Alack! I have had the gout! I would fain have persuaded myself that it was a sprain; and then, that it was only the gout come to look for Mr. Chute at Strawberry Hill: but none of my evasions will do." Again in 1760, to the Earl of Strafford: "In short, my lord, I have got the gout-yes, the gout in earnest. I was seized on Monday morning, suffered dismally all night, am now wrapped in flannels like the picture of a Morocco ambassador, and am carried to bed by two servants. You see virtue and leanness are no preservatives." "Nobody," he tells Conway, "would believe me six years ago when I said I had the gout. They would do leanness and temperance honours to which they have not the least claim." And to Montagu he writes: "If either my father or my mother had had it, I should not dislike it so much. I am herald enough to approve it if it descended genealogically; but it is an absolute upstart in me, and what is more provoking, I had trusted to my great abstinence for keeping me from it: but thus it is, if I had any gentlemanlike virtue, as patriotism or loyalty, I might have got something by them; I had nothing but that beggarly virtue, temperance, and she had not interest enough to keep me from a fit of the gout." Two years later, to the same friend: "It is very hard, when you can plunge over head and ears in Irish claret, and not have even your heel vulnerable by the gout, that such a Pythagorean as I am should yet be subject to it." To Gray the poet-another "martyr," and even unto death-he writes in 1765: "You have tapped a dangerous topic; I can talk gout by the hour. It is my great mortification, and has disappointed all the hopes that I had built on temperance and hardiness." But we must not be doing, what Walpole only said he could do,— talk gout by the hour. Else might this mingle-mangle expand into further Half-hours with the Best Authors in easy-chair and slit shoe. If apology be needed for it, even at its present length, let us submit one in a hope that some gouty subject may have found diversion, and therefore relief, in dipping into these patchwork pages, on a topic he is too familiar withal, and may even now have at his fingers' ends. "Comfort me, boy,”saith the fantastic Don in Shakspeare, to that enfant terrible, master Moth; "what great men have been in love?" Our readings here and there may be taken as a fractional answer (at any rate an answer that comes out in fractions) to the slippered sufferer's appeal, Comfort me, scribbler; what great men have had the gout? For, as Cowper's last stanzas bear record, Misery still delights to trace XVII. About Peter Bell and Primroses. A CUE FROM WORDSWORTH. 'O Wordsworth the meanest flower that blows could give thoughts which did often lie too deep for tears. Το Wordsworth's Peter Bell a yellow primrose was a yellow What more would you Sure never man like him primrose, and it was nothing more. have? the potter would have said. had roamed! yet for all his trudgings over Cheviot Hills and through Yorkshire dales, not by the value of a hair was heart or head the better. He roved among the vales and streams, in the green wood and hollow dell: they were his dwellings night and day, but nature ne'er could find the way into the heart of Peter Bell. 66 In vain, through every changeful year Did Nature lead him as before; A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more." In his essay on Use and Beauty, Mr. Herbert Spencer makes some remarks on the contrast between the feeling with |