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[28:1] Perhaps few authors afford so many curious illustrations of the substitution of fanciful analogy for the severe logic of a practical lawyer, as Lord Kames—e. g. when, in his essays on British antiquities, he identifies hereditary descent with the law of gravitation, and the inclination of the mind to continue downwards in a straight line, as a stone falls from a height; so that, "in tracing out a family, the mind descends by degrees from the father, first to the eldest son, and so downwards in the order of age:" pleasant enough speculations, yet not likely to serve any good purpose in practical law.
[29:1] Essay on Eloquence.
[45:1] Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion, 1705, 8vo.
[45:2] The English Malady, p. 330-331. I have run my eye over Cheyne's "Natural Method of Curing Diseases of the Body and Mind," 1742, 8vo,—the only work I am aware of his having published subsequently to the date of Hume's letter, but I have found in it no trace of a reference to Hume's case. Cheyne's works are perhaps better known to the public in general, than any medical books of the same period, and their curious discursive contents amply repay perusal. Their science is of course held to be completely superseded, but the unscientific reader cannot help thinking that there is much sagacious good counsel in his advice, notwithstanding the eccentric garrulity with which it is uttered. His account of his own experiences, in experimenting on himself, is the most interesting department of his medical observations. He describes every thing with a sort of rude eloquence, infinitely more pleasing to an ordinary reader than scientific precision; and the recklessness with which he appears to have submitted his own carcass to the most violent changes of regimen, inclines one to think that he had applied towards it the fiat experimentum in compore vili. He tells us that he was disposed to "corpulence by the whole race of one side" of his family. In the quotation given above, he represents himself as having been studious in his youth. He began to practise his profession in London, of which he says—"The number of fires, sulphurous and bituminous; the vast expense of tallow and ftid oil in candles and lamps, under and above ground; the clouds of stinking breaths and perspiration, not to mention the ordure of so many diseased, both intelligent and unintelligent animals; the crowded churches, churchyards, and burying places, with putrifying bodies, the sinks, butcher houses, stables, dunghills, and the necessary stagnation, fermentation, and mixture of all variety of all kinds of atoms, are more than sufficient to putrify, poison, and infect the air, for twenty miles round it." Having come from the fresh air of the country into so hopeful an atmosphere, he seems to have resolved that his habit of living should be an equally great contrast to his previous studious abstinence. "Upon my coming to London, I all of a sudden changed my whole manner of living. I found the bottle-companions, the younger gentry, and free-livers, to be the most easy of access, and most quickly susceptible of friendship and acquaintance,—nothing being necessary for that purpose but to be able to eat lustily, and swallow down much liquor; and being naturally of a large size, a cheerful temper, and tolerable lively imagination; and having, in my country retirement, laid in store of ideas and facts,—by these qualifications I soon became caressed by them, and grew daily in bulk, and in friendship with these gay gentlemen and their acquaintances. I was tempted to continue this course, no doubt, from a liking, as well as to force a trade, which method I had observed to succeed with some others: and thus constantly dining and supping in taverns, and in the houses of my acquaintances of taste and delicacy, my health was in a few years brought into great distress, by so sudden and violent a change. I grew excessively fat, short-breathed, lethargic, and listless."
The consequences were "a constant, violent headach, giddiness, lowness, anxiety, and terror," and he went about "like a malefactor condemned, or one who expected every moment to be crushed by a ponderous instrument of death hanging over his head." These evil symptoms prompted him to abandon suppers and restrict himself to a small quantity of animal food and of fermented liquors. He very naturally found that on this abrupt change all his "bouncing, protesting, and undertaking companions" forsook him, and "dropped off like autumnal leaves," leaving him to vegetate in temperate dreariness, while they "retired to comfort themselves with a cheer-up cup," so that he pathetically tells us, "I was forced to retire into the country quite alone, being reduced to the state of Cardinal Wolsey, when he said, that if he had served his Maker as faithfully and warmly as he had his prince, he would not have forsaken him in that extremity."
It would be difficult to follow out the multitudinous course of remedies he adopted, commencing with "volatiles, foetids, bitters, chalybeats, and mineral waters," and how he took twenty grains of "what is called the prince's powder," and "had certainly perished under the operation, but for an over-dose of laudanum after it," having thus experienced something like the good fortune of the man of Thessaly who leaped into a quickset hedge. Under these circumstances he felt his body "melting away like a snow-ball in summer." Having tried the Bath waters, he appears to have somewhat revived, whereupon by increasing his quantity of "animal food and strong liquors," he was "heated so," that he "apprehended a hectic." His next change was to a milk diet, in which experiment he was confirmed by a visit to Dr. Taylor of Croydon, its apostle, whom he found "at home, at his full quart of cow's milk, which was all his dinner." He found in consequence of this change, that he "increased in spirits, strength, appetite and gaiety," until, the old Adam struggling within him, he "began to find a craving and insufferable longing for more solid and toothsome food, and for higher and stronger liquors." Hereupon we have him getting more generous in his diet, but still, as he counts it, "sober, moderate, and plain," in so far as he "drank not above a quart or three pints at most of wine any day." Under this regimen, he says, "I swelled to such an enormous size, that upon my last weighing I exceeded thirty-two stones." Then came fits of various kinds, and a dreary period of hypochondria, with recurrences to the low diet system, and then such startling revulsions from it as the following: "I resolved to change my half pint of port at dinner, into the same quantity of Florence. I ate, at the same time, a good deal of more butter with my vegetables, and plenty of old rich cheese; and likewise nuts extremely—I procured from abroad and at home, great plenty of all kinds, as filberts, walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, &c., eating them in great quantities after dinner by way of dessert," but in pity to the digestive sympathies of the reader this subject must be dropped. Dr. Cheyne is—not the martyr, but the hero of dyspepsia, and Mrs. Radcliffe could not have drawn him through a longer series of horrors than his inventive genius seems to have created for himself.
