rming the adviser chosen by Moliere, who,
when asked by Louis XIV., himself a slave to medicine, what he did about
a doctor, said, "O sire, when I am ill, I send for him. He comes; we
have a chat and enjoy ourselves. He prescribes; I don't take it,--I am
cured."

Perhaps few are aware of the various heroisms of the chronic patient. It
must have been prophetic that the Mexicans of olden time thus saluted
their new-born babes: "Child, thou art come into the world to endure,
suffer, and say nothing." It is grand to be upborne by a spirit
unperturbed, although flesh and nerve may strike through the best soul
for a moment; even as the great and equable Longinus, on his way to
execution, is said to have turned pale and halted for an instant; while
we all know, that, after the Stuart rebellion, the rough old Duke
Balmoral, a lesser man, never faltered, but, with boisterous courage,
cried out for the fatal axe to be carried by his side.

We had been used to think Andrew Jackson an iron-built conqueror, who
never knew a pain, until Parton told of the violent cramp which would
seize him while marching at the head of his army, when he simply threw
himself over a bent sapling in the forest till the spasm subsided, and
marched on. The same endurance nerved him to the end. For many of his
last years not free for one hour from pain, he still sat at the White
House, never intermitting any duty, although the mere signing of his
name drew its witness of suffering from every pore. It is with sorrow,
too, that we have lately read that the beloved Florence Nightingale has
been held by disease, not only to her room, but to a single position in
it, for a whole year. And one of our own poets, even dearer to his
friends for the sainthood of suffering, still ever is pressing on with
tuneful courage. Hear him singing,

"Who hath not learned in hours of faith
The truth, to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own?"

Named among the valiant, yet more sad than heroic, was poor Heine on his
"mattress-grave." Most pathetically did he lay himself down, this
"soldier in the war for the liberation of humanity." Of the last time
that Heine left the house before yielding to disease, he says: "With
difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and almost sank down as I
entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty,
our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At