with a thousand needles. Lamb, moreover, in his anxiety,
had administered a formidable dose of cognac and water to the sufferer,
and _he_ (used only to the simple element) babbled without cessation."

LXXIX.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

_January_ 9, 1824.

Dear B.B.,--Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable
day-mare,--"a whoreson lethargy," Falstaff calls it,--an indisposition
to do anything or to be anything; a total deadness and distaste; a
suspension of vitality; an indifference to locality; a numb, soporifical
good-for-nothingness; an ossification all over; an oyster-like
insensibility to the passing events; a mind-stupor; a brawny defiance to
the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you ever have a very bad
cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes? This
has been for many weeks my lot and my excuse. My fingers drag heavily
over this paper, and to my thinking it is three-and-twenty furlongs from
here to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; nothing
is of more importance than another. I am flatter than a denial or a
pancake; emptier than Judge Parke's wig when the head is in it; duller
than a country stage when the actors are off it,--a cipher, an o! I
acknowledge life at all only by an occasional convulsional cough and a
permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is
weary of me, My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth
the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster
courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from
mutton; nothing interests me. 'T is twelve o'clock, and Thurtell [1] is
just now coming out upon the new drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his
greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality; yet cannot I elicit a
groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end
to-morrow, I should just say, "Will it?" I have not volition enough left
to dot my _i_'s, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my
head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and
they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub Street
attic to let,--not so much as a joint-stool left in it; my hand writes,
not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are
off. Oh for a vigorous fit of gout, colic, toothache,--an earwig in my
auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain is life,--the sharper the more