'multiply and disperse over the immense waste
desert, which is as boundless as the ocean.' Sail with the early
Northern discoverers, and penetrate to the heart of winter, among
sea-serpents and bears and tusked morses with the faces of men. Then,
what think you of Columbus, and the stern soul of Cortes, and the
kingdom of Mexico, and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that
audacious brute Pizarro; and the Polynesians, just for all the world
like the Ancient Britons; and the American Indians and the South-sea
Islanders? How petulant and young and adventurous and frisky your
hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! Then, for that vice of
the mind which I call sectarianism,--not in the religious sense of the
word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door
neighbor because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours boiled;
and gossipping and prying into people's affairs, and backbiting, and
thinking heaven and earth are coming together if some broom touch a
cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains what
like a large and generous, mildly aperient (I beg your pardon, my dear)
course of history! How it clears away all the fumes of the head,--better
than the hellebore with which the old leeches of the Middle Ages
purged the cerebellum! There, amidst all that great whirl and sturmbad
(storm-bath), as the Germans say, of kingdoms and empires, and races and
ages, how your mind enlarges beyond that little feverish animosity to
John Styles, or that unfortunate prepossession of yours that all the
world is interested in your grievances against Tom Stokes and his wife!

"I can only touch, you see, on a few ingredients in this magnificent
pharmacy; its resources are boundless, but require the nicest
discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who
obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of
geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the
first strata I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling,
crystallized masses; and by the time I had got him into the tertiary
period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht and the conchiferous
marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. Kitty, my dear, it is no
laughing matter! I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at
Cambridge who was meant for the church, when he suddenly caught a cold
fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading out of