But gout, with all its pains, has yet its redeeming characteristics. That great law of compensation which reduces the inequalities of our lot, and makes Brown, Jones, and Robinson come out about even in the long run, is not inoperative here. The gout is painful, but its respectability is unquestionable. It is the disease of a gentleman. It is a certificate of good birth more satisfactory than any which the Heralds' College or the Genealogical Association can furnish. It is but right, too, that the man who can date back his family history to Plymouth or Jamestown in this country, and to Runnymede on the other side of the Atlantic, should pay something for such a privilege. A man may never have indulged in "the sweet poison of the Tuscan grape" himself, but can he reasonably complain of an incontrovertible testimony to the fact that his ancestors lived well! Chacun à son goût: for myself, I should much prefer my honoured family name, with all its associations with the brave knight who made it famous, accompanied by the only possession which I have received by hereditary right, to the most unequivocal state of health burdened with such a name as Jinkins.
Mentally and spiritually, the gout is far from being a useless institution. It ripens a man's judgment, and prunes away the radical tendencies of his nature. It will convert the wildest of revolutionists into the stiffest of conservatives. It teaches a man to look at things as they really are, and not as enthusiasm would have them represented. No gouty man would ever look to the New York Tribune as the exponent of his religious or political creed. His complaint has a positive character, and it makes him earnest to find something positive in religion and politics. The negativeness of radicalism tires him. He deprecates every thing like change. He thinks that religion, and society, and government were established for some better end than to afford a perpetual employment to the destructive powers of visionary reformers and professional philanthropists. He longs to find constancy and stability in something besides his inexorable disorder.
There is another disorder which people generally seem to consider a very trifling affair, but which any one who knows it will allow to be productive of the most unmistakable pain. I refer to neuralgia. Who pities a neuralgic person? Any healthy man, when asked about it, will answer in his ignorance that it is "only a headache." But ask the school teacher, whose throbbing head seems to be beating time to the ceaseless muttering and whispering of her scholars as they bend over their tasks—ask the student, whose thoughts, like undisciplined soldiers, will not fall into the ranks, and whose head seems to be occupied by a steam engine of enormous power, running at the highest rate of pressure, with the driver sitting on the safety-valve—ask them whether neuralgia is "only a headache"! Who can tell the cause of the prevalence of this scourge? whether it proceeds from our houses overheated with intolerable furnaces and anthracite coal, or from our treacherous and unconstant climate so forcibly described by Choate: "Cold to-day; hot to-morrow; mercury at eighty degrees in the morning, with wind at south-west; and in three hours more a sea turn, with wind at east, a thick fog from the very bottom of the ocean, and a fall of forty degrees of Fahrenheit." The uncertainty which seems to attend all human science, and the science of medicine in particular, envelops this mysterious disease, and thousands of us are left to suffer and wonder what the matter is.
But all of these pains, gouty, neuralgic, and otherwise, have yet their sweet uses, and like the vile reptile Shakespeare tells us of, are adorned with a precious jewel. The old Roman emperors in the hour of triumph used to have a slave stand behind them to whisper in their ear, from time to time, the unwelcome but salutary truth that they were but mortal men. Even now, on the occasion of the enthronement of a Pope, a lighted candle is applied to a bunch of flax fixed upon a staff, and as the smoke dissipates itself into thin air before the newly-crowned Pontiff, surrounded as he is by all the emblems of religion and all the insignia and pomp of worldly power, the same great truth of the perishableness of all mortal things is impressed upon his mind by the chanting of the simple but eloquent phrase, Sic transit gloria mundi. But we neuralgic and gouty wretches need no whispering slave nor smoking flax to remind us of our frailty and the transientness of our happiness and glory. We carry with us a monitor who checks our swelling pride, and teaches us effectually the brevity of human joys. We are very apt, in our impatience and short-sightedness, to think that if we had the management of the world and the dispensation of pleasure and suffering, every thing could be conducted in a much more satisfactory manner. If it were so, we should undoubtedly carry things on in the style of a French restaurant, so that we could have pain à discretion. But on the whole, I am inclined to think that we had better leave these matters to the management of that infinite Power which gives us day by day our daily pain, and from which we receive in the long run about what is meet for us. I hope that I shall not be thought ill-bred or profane in using such expressions as these. At my time of life it is too late to begin to murmur. A few twinges more or less are nothing when the hair grows gray and the eye is dimmed with the mists of age. The man who knows nothing of the novitiate of patience—who has passed through life without the chastening discipline of bodily pain—has missed one of the best parts of existence. To suffer is one of the noblest prerogatives of human nature. Without suffering, life would be robbed of half its zest, and the thought of death would drive us to despair.
When I was a young man, and gave little thought to the gout and the other ills that vex me at present, I saw a wonderful exhibition of patience, which I now daily recall to mind, and wish I could imitate. I was sojourning in Florence, that lovely city, whose every association is one of calm and satisfactory pleasure undisturbed by any thing like bodily suffering. I enjoyed the friendship of a young American amateur artist of unquestioned talent, but whose artistic efforts were interfered with by the frequent attacks of a serious and excruciating disorder. It was considerable time after I made his acquaintance before I knew that he was an invalid. I noticed his lameness, but whenever we met he wore a smiling face, and had a cheerful word for every body. One evening I called in at his quiet lodgings near the Lung' Arno, and found a party of some six or eight Americans talking over their recollections of home. He was entertaining them with the explanation of an imaginary panorama of New England, and a musical friend threw in illustrative passages from the piano in the intervals. The parlour resounded with our laughter at his irresistible fun; but in the midst of it all, he asked us to excuse him for a moment, and went into his bedroom. After a little while, another engagement calling me away, I went into his chamber to speak with him before leaving. I found him lying upon his bed, writhing like Laocoön, while great drops stood upon his brow and agony was depicted on his patient face. He resisted all my attempts to do any thing for him; the attack had lasted all day, but was at some times severer than at others; he should feel better soon, and would go back to his friends; I had better not stop with him, as it might attract their attention in the parlour, &c. So I took my leave. The next morning I met one of his friends, who told me that he returned to his company a few minutes after my departure, and entertained them for an hour or more with an exhibition of his powers of wit and humour, which eclipsed all his previous efforts. Poor S. C.! His weary but uncomplaining spirit laid down that crippled body, which never gave aught but pain to its possessor, three or four years ago, and passed, let us hope, into a happier state of existence, which flesh and blood, with their countless maladies and dolours, may not inherit.
The traveller in the south of Europe frequently encounters, in his perambulations through the streets and squares of cities, a group of people gathered around a monk, who is discoursing to them of those sublime truths which men are prone to lose sight of in their walks abroad. The style of the sermon is not, it is true, what we should look for from Newman, or Ravignan, or Ventura, but it has in it those fundamental principles of true eloquence, simplicity and earnestness; and the coarse brown habit, the knotted cord, and the pale, serene, devout face of the preacher, harmonize wondrously with the self-denying doctrine he teaches, and give a double force to all his words. His instructions frequently concern the simple moral duties of life and the exercise of the cardinal virtues, which he enforces by illustrations drawn from the lives of canonized saints, who won their heavenly crown and their earthly fame of blessedness by the practice of those virtues. Allow me to close my sermon on suffering in the manner of the preaching friars, though I may not draw my illustrations from the ancient martyrologies; for I apprehend that it will be more in keeping with the serious character of this essay to take them from another source. We have all laughed at Dickens's characters of Mark Tapley and Mr. Toots. The former was celebrated for "keeping jolly under disadvantageous circumstances," and seemed to mourn over those dispensations of good fortune which detracted from his credit in being jolly. The latter was never known to indulge in any complaint, but met every mishap and disappointment with a manly resignation and the simple remark, "It's of no consequence." Even when he was completely ingulfed in misfortunes, when Pelion seemed to have been heaped upon Ossa, and both upon him, he did not give way to despair. He only gave utterance more fervently to his favourite maxim, "It's of no consequence. Nothing is of any consequence whatever!" Now, laugh at it as we may, this is a great truth. It is the foundation of all true philosophy—of all practical religion. A few years more, and what will it avail us to have bargained successfully, to have lived in splendour, to have left in history a name that shall be the synonyme of power! A few years, and what shall we care for all our present sufferings and the light afflictions which are but for a moment! May we not say with Solomon, that "All is vanity," and with poor Toots, that "Nothing is of any consequence whatever"? Now, if there are any people who are likely to arrive at this satisfactory conclusion, and who need the consolation imparted by the reception and full appreciation of the deep truth it contains, it is the gouty, and rheumatic, and neuralgic wretches whom I have had in mind while writing this paper. Let me, in conclusion, as one who has had some experience, and is not merely theorizing, exhort all such persons to meditate upon the lives of the two great patterns of patience whom I have brought forward as examples; and to bear in mind that it is only through the resignation of Toots, that they can attain to the jollity of Tapley. Likewise let me counsel those who may be passing through life unharmed by serious misfortune and untrammelled by bodily pain, never to lose sight of that striking admonition of old Sir Thomas Browne's, "Measure not thyself by thy morning shadow, but by the extent of thy grave; and reckon thyself above the earth, by the line thou must be contented with under it."
BOYHOOD AND BOYS
Human nature is a very telescopic "institution." It delights to dwell on whatever is most distant. Lord Rosse's famous instrument dwindles down to a mere opera glass if you compare it with the mental vision of a restless boy, looking forward to the time when he shall don a tail-coat and a beaver hat. How his young heart swells with pride as he anticipates the day when he shall be his own master, as the phrase is—when he shall be able to stay out after nine o'clock in the evening, and to go home without being subjected to the ignominy of being escorted by a chambermaid! If he be of a particularly sanguine temperament, his wild imagination is rapt in the contemplation of the possibility of one day having his name in the newspapers as secretary of some public meeting, or as having made a vigorous speech at a political caucus where liberty of speech runs out into slander, and sedition is mistaken for patriotism,—or perhaps even of being one day a Common Councilman, or a member of the Great and General Court. A popular poet of the present day has expressed the same idea in a less prosaic manner:—
"Not rainbow pinions coloured like yon cloud,
The sun's broad banner o'er his western tent,
Can match the bright imaginings of a child
Upon the glories of his coming years:"—
and another bard avers that human blessings are always governing the future, and never the present tense,—or something to that effect. The truth of this nobody will deny who has passed from the boxes of childhood upon the stage of manhood which so charmed his youthful fancy, and finds that the heroes who dazzled him once by their splendid achievements are mere ordinary mortals like himself, whom the blindness or caprice of their fellows has allowed to be dressed in a little brief authority; that the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces he used to gaze on from afar, prove, on a closer inspection, to be mere deceptions of paint and canvas, and that he has only to look behind them to see the rough bricks and mortar of every-day life.