"To shorten my story, she was married to another, which would have distracted me had he proved a good husband; but to my great pleasure, he used her at first with coldness, and afterwards with contempt. I hear he still treats her very ill; and am informed, that she often says to her woman, 'This is a just revenge for my falsehood to my first love: what a wretch am I, that might have been married to the famous Mr. Bickerstaff.'"
My patient looked upon me with a kind of melancholy pleasure, and told me, he did not think it was possible for a man to live to the age I now am of, who in his thirtieth year had been tortured with that passion in its violence. "For my part," said he, "I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep in it; nor keep company with anybody, but two or three friends who are in the same condition."
"There," answered I, "you are to blame; for as you ought to avoid nothing more than keeping company with yourself, so you ought to be particularly cautious of keeping company with men like yourself. As long as you do this, you do but indulge your distemper.
"I must not dismiss you without further instructions. If possible, transfer your passion from the woman you are now in love with, to another; or if you cannot do that, change the passion itself into some other passion; that is, to speak more plainly, find out some other agreeable woman:[339] or if you can't do this, grow covetous, ambitious, litigious; turn your love of woman into that of profit, preferment, reputation; and for a time, give up yourself entirely to the pursuit.
"This is a method we sometimes take in physic, when we turn a desperate disease into one we can more easily cure."
He made little answer to all this, but crying out, "Ah, sir!" for his passion reduced his discourse to interjections.
"There is one thing added, which is present death to a man in your condition, and therefore to be avoided with the greatest care and caution: that is, in a word, to think of your mistress and rival together, whether walking, discoursing, dallying—" "The devil!" he cried out, "who can bear it?" To compose him, for I pitied him very much, "The time will come," said I, "when you shall not only bear it, but laugh at it. As a preparation to it, ride every morning an hour at least with the wind full in your face. Upon your return, recollect the several precepts which I have now given you, and drink upon them a bottle of spa-water. Repeat this every day for a month successively, and let me see you at the end of it." He was taking his leave, with many thanks, and some appearance of consolation in his countenance, when I called him back to acquaint him, that I had private information of a design of the coquettes to buy up all the true spa-water in town; upon which he took his leave in haste, with a resolution to get all things ready for entering upon his regimen the next morning.
FOOTNOTES:
[339] This passage was censured by Thomas Baker in No. 72 of the Female Tatler (December 21, 1707): "Wisdom, virtue, and laboriousness have always been inseparable from the famous Bickerstaff; but if the characters that have first recommended him to the public, and by which only he was known to the world, are no more to be found in those works that go under his name, the author is dead, and the papers are spurious," &c.