“Nations ransom’d and the world o’er-joyed”
walked once more emancipated, as Milton sings,
Numerous are the blunders under which humanity has reposed in incurious apathy. The sun gamboled round the earth so long, that, when they changed places and motions, the denizens at that moment of our planet were cheated out of several days in their sublunary or circumsolar career. What was that mistake in comparison with the disastrous error of having for centuries obdurately turned their backs on the inexhaustible laboratory in which alone health could be bought, and perversely purchased destruction from a series of quacks, whose infinite retails had caused more wholsale ruin than the pernicious wrath of Pelides? “Look here upon this picture and on this.” Declining to accede to the unpleasant request we hurry to another phenomenon. The inestimable discovery of the Water-Cure has proved the posthumous triumph of Old Hygrostroma. Instead of being a damper to good-fellowship, the wet-blanket is synonimous with, and symbolical, and productive of all that is vivacious, hilarious, obstreperous, and jolly. A dozen of champagne is not an equivalent for the “SHEET;” and when you are once properly “packed,” by the mere flow of your animal spirits, and a tumbler of pure spring water, you shall “sew up” the most potential toper and wit, whose facetiousness grows with the consumption of his wine.
Here we perceive that our readers, by an unmistakeable twitch of the muscles of the face, intimate their suspicions that our fidelity to the water system is impeachable. An explanatory sentence is unavoidable. In the month of August, we are always like Napoleon at Elba, confident of the incorruptible attachment of our adherents, but at a considerable distance from every one of them--certain of re-assuming, in undiminished splendour, and amidst thunders of acclamation, our undisputed sway on the first of September, but much at a loss a week before our return to find a bark, however frail, in which to trust our fortunes--projecting stupendous expeditions with invincible armies, and, in the meanwhile, possessing not even a recruit from the awkward squad to put through his facings. The days were insufferably hot or unmitigably rainy. Nobody cared about news, nor did anybody send us grouse. The Benledi steamboat was stranded with a broken back on a rock of the Fifeshire coast; and harrowing paragraphs represented all the railways in every direction as strewed with the “disjecta membra” of ill-fated travellers. The thunder and lightning deafened and blinded us, while the absence of all companionship reduced us to compulsory dumbness. In this torpor of the soul and confusion of the intellect, looking up with a vacant stare to the cupola, on which the firmament was playing with inimitable rapidity a fierce prelude, we were startled by the appearance of Mr Lane’s elegant and agreeable volume. It found us in no very consecutive or severely logical mood. The engravings were amusing--the writing was pleasant. Having skimmed the contents with our customary velocity, we flung ourselves back upon the downy slopes of our autumn ottoman, and poured forth the rhapsody which has bewildered our friends. It could not well be otherwise. There was such implicit faith in Mr Lane--in union with so much good feeling and good sense--pleading his case so fervently--interesting us so much in himself, his illness and his recovery, his relapses and his mendings, his packing and scrubbing, his company and his talk, his walks and his rides, his digestions and reflections, and leaving us in the end so little convinced of the unquestionable superiority of the treatment which had bettered him, and no doubt many others, that, assured of there being nothing new under the sun, we took our flight back into the olden times to recall, if we could, when water ever aspired so loftily before in popular estimation. Icarus-like, we dropped into the bosom of the Ægean, and were dragged up opportunely by the phantom of Thales at Miletus.
