either I countermine it with another
sadness, or I kindle squibs about me again, and fly into sportfulness
and company.'

At the age of thirty-five he writes from his bed describing every detail
of what he frantically calls 'a sickness which I cannot name or
describe,' and ends his letter: 'I profess to you truly, that my
loathness to give over now, seems to myself an ill sign that I shall
write no more.' It was at this time that he wrote the _Biathanatos_,
with its explicit declaration in the preface: 'Whensoever any
affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own
hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own
sword.' Fifteen years later, when one of his most serious illnesses was
upon him, and his life in real danger, he notes down all his symptoms as
he lies awake night after night, with an extraordinary and, in itself,
morbid acuteness. 'I observe the physician with the same diligence as he
the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him; I overtake him, I
over-run him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear the
more because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness
because he would not have me see it.' As he lies in bed, he realises 'I
am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them.
They conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for
dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and ask
how I do to-morrow. Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practise
my lying in the grave by lying still.' This preying upon itself of the
brain is but one significant indication of a temperament, neurotic
enough indeed, but in which the neurosis is still that of the curious
observer, the intellectual casuist, rather than of the artist. A
wonderful piece of self-analysis, worthy of St. Augustine, which occurs
in one of his funeral sermons, gives poignant expression to what must
doubtless have been a common condition of so sensitive a brain. 'I throw
myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and His angels
together; and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels for the
noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door;
I talk on in the same posture of prayer, eyes lifted up, knees bowed
down, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I last
thought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I
forgot what I was about; Bu