re now advocating, and therein finds one of his rewards. It is
not safe to pinch a tiger's tail; yet, when the animal is sick, perhaps he
will not bite although you tread upon it heavily. Healthy men and healthy
stomachs tolerate no oppression.

London is full now; elsewhere country folks come out of doors, invited by
fine weather. Walk where you will, in country or in town, and look at all
the faces that you meet. Traverse the Strand, and Regent-street, and
Holborn, and Cheapside; get into a boat at London bridge, steam to
Gravesend, and look at your fellow-passengers: examine where you will, the
stamp of our civilization, sickliness, is upon nine people in any ten.
There are good reasons why this should be so, and so let it continue. We
have excluded sanitary calculations from our social life; we have had
hitherto unhealthy homes, and we will keep them. Bede tells of a Mercian
noble on his death-bed, to whom a ghost exhibited a scrap of paper, upon
which were written his good deeds; then the door opened, and an
interminable file of ghosts brought in a mile or two of scroll, whereon
his misdeeds were all registered, and made him read them. Our wars against
brute health are glorious, and we rejoice to feel that of such sins we
have no scanty catalogue; we are content with our few items of mere
sanitary virtue. As for sanitary reformers, they are a company of Danaids;
they may get some of us into their sieve, but we shall soon slip out
again. When a traveler proposed, at Ghadames in the Sahara, to put up a
lantern here and there of nights among the pitch-dark streets, the people
said his notion might be good, but that, as such things never had been
tried before, it would be presumptuous to make the trial of them now. The
traveler, a Briton, must have felt quite at home when he heard that
objection. Amen, then; with the Ghadamese, we say, Let us have no New
Lights.

VI. Art Against Appetite.

The object of food is, to support the body in its natural development that
it may reach a reasonable age without becoming too robust. Civilization
can instruct us so to manage, that a gentle dissolution tread upon the
heels of growth, that, as Metastasio hath it,

--"dalle fasce,
Si comincia a morir quando si nasce."(2)

An infant's appetite is all for milk; but art suggests a few additions to
that lamentably simple diet. A lady not long since complacently informed
her medical attendant that,