bouts in the scale of
humanity. When last prostrated by rheumatic fever, or its remedies, I
remember, indeed, to have been inclined to mathematics. When very ill I
had suffered agonies in my dreams from the persecutions of an
impossible quantity, and perhaps the association of ideas suggested, as
I slowly gathered strength, a little problem in statics. It had been
taught me by my dear tutor at Cambridge, whom undergraduates have long
ceased to trouble, as a proof of the pathos that dwells in figures; and
I kept repeating it to myself, with the letters all misplaced, till I
became exhausted by tears and emotion.

As a general rule, however, even mathematics fail to interest the
convalescent. 'Man delights not him; no, nor woman neither;' but
Literature, if light in the hand, and always provided that he has his
back to the window, is a pleasure to him only next to that of his new
found appetite and his first chicken. His taste 'has suffered a sick
change,' but that by no means implies it has deteriorated. On the
contrary, his critical faculty has fled (which is surely an immense
advantage), while he has recovered much of that power of appreciation
which rarely abides with us to maturity. He is not on the outlook for
mistakes, slips of style, anachronisms; he derives no pleasure from the
discovery of spots in the sun, but is content to bask in the rays of
it. He does not necessarily return to the favourites of his youth,
though he has a tendency that way, but the shackles of convention have
slipped away from him with his flesh, and he reads what he likes, and
not what he has been told he ought to like. He has been so long removed
from public opinion, that, like a shipwrecked crew in an open boat, it
has ceased to affect him; only, instead of taking to cannibalism, he
takes to what is nice. As his physical appetite is fastidious, so his
mental palate has a relish only for titbits. If ever there was a time
for a reasonable being to 'dip' into books, or to enjoy 'half-hours
with the best authors,' this is it; but weak as the patient is, he
commonly declines to have his tastes dictated to; perhaps there is an
unpleasant association in his mind, arising from Brand and Liebig, with
all 'extracts;' but, at all events, those literary compilations oppress
and bewilder him; he objects to the extraordinary fertility of 'Ibid,'
an author whose identity he cannot quite call to mind, and prefers to
choose for himself.

Biography is o