rded as their "sensation," or stock in trade. True,
there is now and then one made happier by hearing that he seems
exceedingly miserable; but it is more natural to brighten with pleasant
words, and a morning compliment of good looks will often set one up for
the day. Indeed, we fancy that most persons, knowing their disease, in
their own minds, prefer that it should chiefly rest there. To discuss
seems only to define it more sharply, and to be greatly condoled is only
debilitating. Montaigne, to avoid death-bed sympathies, desired to die
on horseback; while against the eternal repeating of these ills for
pity, he says that "the man who makes himself dead when living is likely
to be held as though alive when he is dying."

Likewise the friendliness which keeps reminding one of the fatal end
serves none. It is both impolitic and impolite; as if there were an
unsightly mole upon the face, and every visitor remarked, as he entered,
"Ah, I see you still have that ugly mole!" With all these comforters it
is finally better to do without their devotions than to be subjected to
their discouragements. How much Pope resented this rude style of
criticism may be seen from his tart exclamation, "They all say 't is
pity I am so sickly, and I think 't is pity they are so healthy."

Yet that incurable sufferer, Harriet Martineau, testifies that when a
friend said to her, with the face of an angel, "Why should we be bent
upon your being better, and make up a bright prospect for you? I see no
brightness in it; and the time seems past for expecting you ever to be
well,"--her spirits rose at once with the sturdy recognition of the
truth. And Dr. Henry, with the same directness, wrote to his friend,
"Come out to me next week; I have got something important to do,--I have
got to die."

This must surely be called the heroic treatment; but for those who are
not equal to such, it is good to have a physician of tact, who shall not
doom them regularly every day. Plato said that physicians were the only
men who might lie at pleasure, since our health depends upon the vanity
and falsity of their promises. And yet one is not usually deceived by
this flattery; but it is vastly more comfortable to hear pleasant things
instead of gloomy, and the sick would rather prefer a dance to a dirge.
Of this amiable sort must have been the attendant who caused Pope to
say, "Ah, my dear friend, I am dying every day of a hundred good
symptoms"; and still more cha