see the public wheels greased in the most
primitive fashion; for, the aristocracy does
not frequent these Sunday tea-gardens; the
wealthy tradesman scarcely knows of their
existence; the most elevated personages who
are aware of them are the licensing magistrates.
Here come, emphatically, the public;
the working, toiling, sweating, patient,
legislatively-silent, and neither monster petitioning
nor monstrously petitioning, public;
hither they bring the wives of their bosoms,
and the children of their hopes and
poverty; and though Heaven knows the air
from the Isle of Dogs is not the balmiest, or
most odoriferous in the world—though the
gardens and summer-houses are of the
shabbiest and darkest—here they sit in the
summer evenings, and smoke, drink, and
enjoy themselves.

Yes. They will smoke the strongest of
tobacco; they will call for a pot of mild
ale, and a seedy biscuit; Mrs. Opus will
quench her thirst, and the boys will take a
drink, and even young two years old will
have a sup, and John Opus, the
breadwinner, will take a mighty pull. And it
is my firm belief that if all the palace
gardens, parks, picture-galleries, museums,
conservatories, and aviaries, in all England,
were to be opened on Sunday from morn
till dusk, directly; as soon as the public
had sensibly enjoyed a sufficient quantity of
art-instruction, and was approaching within
sight of the distant confines of art-botheration,
John Opus, the working man, would
say to Rebecca his wife, " Now, Becky,
I just feel comfortable for a pipe and a
glass of ale, and I am sure you must be
thirsty, so come along." And they will go
and partake of these unlawful things; and
I am sorry that the world is so depraved:
but grease there must be—or things you
little dream of will take fire from
over-friction—and though you lay on the genuine
Pharisee paint an inch thick, to this com-
plexion you must come.

SICK BODY, SICK BRAIN.

OCCASIONAL illustrations of the superstition
of the middle ages led us to remark,
some time ago, on the great prevalence of
insanity, caused in the good old times by the
mixture of horrible thoughts and lumps of
diseased fancy with the ideas common among
the people.* Of the wretched position of
unhappy lunatics, persecuted, maimed, tortured,
and burnt by neighbours and magistrates,
who accepted as facts all their delusions, and
convicted them by the testimony of their
own wild words, some illustrations have been
given. The region of superstition that
remains yet to be sketched is very rich in
produce of this kind. I do not mean to pass
into that region now, because it was not by
superstition only, or only by that and the
oppressive forms of a debased church system,
that the minds of men were broken down,
powerful agencies as they both were. These
moral pestilences acted upon brains that
had been first weakened by the physical
plagues to which bodies were subject.

We are not free from such afflictions yet.
We are at this hour shrinking from the
breath of cholera. It comes home to the
poor. It comes home to the minister of
state. He may sacrifice sanitary legislation
to the first comer who attempts to sneer it
down, and journey home to find the grateful
plague sitting in his own hall ready with the
only thanks that it can offer. At this we
sincerely grieve, and perhaps tremble; but
we know nothing of the terror of a plague as
it was terrible in the old times of famine
I among the poor, wrong living and bad housing
among the rich, of townships altogether
drainless, of filth, ignorance, and horrible
neglect. The ravages made formerly in
Europe by the small-pox or measles, the
dreadful spread of leprosy, the devastation
on the path of the black death and the
sweating sickness, have no parallel in our
day. Extreme as are the sufferings of our
poor in the hungry winter season, we
understand but faintly the intensity and extent of
the distress which the old poet had often
seen who wrote—

Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace:
Ah, who shall hide us from the winter's face?
Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease.
     From winter, plague and pestilence, good Lord,
     deliver us.

I particularly wish to show how in the
good old times men's bodies were wasted,
and how there was produced out of such
wasting a weakening and wasting of their
minds. The treatises of a learned German
Doctor Hecker, on the Epidemics of the
Middle Ages (which have been translated for
our Sydenham Society by Doctor Babington)
will provide an ample fund on which to draw
for information. We cannot study rightly
sickness of the mind without bringing
sickness of the body into question. It is
necessary to begin with that.

There was one disease called the black
death, the black plague, or the great
mortality. The most dreadful visitation of it
was one that began in China, spread over
Asia, and in the year thirteen hundred and
forty-eight entered Europe. Europe was
then, however, not unused to plagues. Six
others had made themselves famous during
the preceding eight and forty years. The
black plague spread from the south of
Europe to the north, occupying about three
years in its passage. In two years it had
reached Sweden; in three years it had
conquered Russia. The fatal influence came
among men ripe to receive it. Europe was
full of petty war; citizens were immured in
cities, in unwholesome houses overlooking

* See vol. ix., pp. 170, 410.