f Samuel Greg; but it was in some degree true
of him also that, though firm, tenacious, and infinitely patient, 'he
rather lacked that harder and tougher fibre, both of mind and frame,
which makes the battle of life so easy and so successful to many men.'
It may be suspected in both cases that their excessive and prolonged
devotion to the practice of mesmerism and animal magnetism had tended to
relax rather than to brace the natural fibre. Samuel Greg broke down at
a comparatively early age; and though his brother's more vigorous system
showed no evil results for many long years to come, there was a severe
reaction from the nervous tension of their mesmeric experimentation.

Those who trace despondent speculations of the mind to depressed or
morbid conditions of body will find some support for their thesis in Mr.
Greg's case. When he was only one-and-twenty he writes to his sister
(December 2, 1830):--

I am again attacked with one of those fits of melancholy
indifference to everything, and total incapacity for exertion,
to which I am so often subject, and which are indeed the
chronic malady of my existence. They sometimes last
for many weeks, and during their continuance I do not
believe, among those whose external circumstances are
comfortable, there exists any one more thoroughly miserable....
For nearly four years these fits of melancholy
and depression have been my periodical torment, and as
yet I have found no remedy against them, except strong
stimulants or the society of intimate friends, and even
these are only temporary, and the latter seldom within
my reach, and the former I abstain from partly on principle,
but more from a fear of consequences. Every one
has a thorn in the flesh, and this is mine; but I am
egotistical, if not selfish, in inflicting it upon others. I
begin to think I have mistaken my way both to my own
happiness and the affections of others. My strongest
passion has always been the desire to be loved--as the
French call it, 'le besoin d'etre aime.' It is the great
wish, want, desire, necessity, desideratum of my life, the
source through which I expect happiness to flow to me,
the ultimate aim and object which has led me on in all
the little I have done, and the much that I have tried
to do.

From these broodings the young man was rescued by a year of travel. It
was one of the elements in the domestic scheme of education that the
univers