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in his sleeping-room or even sitting-room,-a difficulty in the soldiering way of life;" and had, if I remember, one hundred and thirty houses torn away in Prag, and sentries posted all round in the distance, to secure silence for his much-meditating indignant soul."* One hundred and

thirty houses torn away in Prag for that one purpose!

Ce n'est qu'à prix d'argent qu'on dort en cette ville.

But a physiological fact like that adds a high multiple to our original interest in so enigmatical a personage as the grim Duke of Friedland. Morose is not all fiction and fancy; nor, perhaps, were Morose's nerves.

There was a nervous crisis in the life of M. Daunou, the once eminent, now almost forgotten French littérateur, when not only was the light of day a trouble to him, but the mere sound of a hand-bell agitated him, even to tears.†

The late King Maximilian of Bavariat is said to have been afflicted by a sense of hearing so acute, that noises of any kind, and of almost any degree, produced a most painful impression upon him. His was, however, a pronounced case of organic disease.

There was a period in Goethe's life, when the poet suffered from great irritability, and every loud sound was a trouble to him. Burke was once tortured by the noise of Fleet-street and the Strand, in that lodging of his over a bookseller's shop near the Temple, from which kind Dr. Nugent removed him, none too soon, to his own house. Leigh Hunt records the time when his nervous sensibility made every passing sound a shock to him, and a hindrance to the task work of his then overtasked pen. According to Lord William Lennox, the late James Kenney, once so popular as a dramatist, could not bear any the most trifling noisesuch as cutting the leaves of a book, the ticking of a clock, writing on rough paper, a loud footstep, or a creaking door. "The postman's knock sent him into a state of most violent excitement, and the dustman's bell used nearly to drive him out of his senses."§

Small sympathy, but much derision, would he have got from the late Lord Lyndhurst, who, when well on towards his ninetieth year, so vigorously upheld the cause of organ-grinders against sufferers and remonstrants like Mr. Babbage. Not a few of his lordship's profession appear to share, more or less, in his robust superiority to nervous irritation. For, as a Saturday Reviewer lately remarked, from the difficulty that occurs in obtaining convictions against these disturbers of study and repose, the brass bands and organ-grinders, it might almost be suspected that some of the police magistrates either have a very uninstructed taste in music or are so happily constituted as to be totally incapable of having their thoughts distracted, or their slumbers broken by any amount of street discord that could be concentrated outside their windows. "It is said that Lord Stowell had a passion for visiting shows, and it may be that other lawyers love the sort of music which usually accompanies those *History of Friedrich II.

+ "Un simple coup de sonnette l'agitait et lui arrachait des larmes." Ste.Beuve, Portraits Contemporains, t. iii. p. 37.

Who, it is to be remarked, suffered much, for many years, from headache, and a part of whose cerebellum was found, on post-mortem examination, to be slightly ossified.-The Times, March 19, 1864.

Fifty Years' Reminiscences, by Lord W. P. Lennox, vol. i. p. 295.

entertainments. It is doubtless advantageous to a lawyer to have a strong digestion, a head that can bear liquor, a mind that no interruption can distract, and nerves incapable of being affected by the most acute or droning sounds; and perhaps there may be among the police magistrates examples of this convenient hardihood of bodily and mental constitution. If, however, there sat upon the bench a magistrate who from his own had learned to feel another's woe, it would not be difficult to find in the Metropolitan Police Act clauses which apply to organ-grinding and brass bands."-But to resume our enumeration of Morose sort of men. Mr. Moultrie tells us of the late William Sidney Walker, that his sense of hearing became so morbidly acute, that, even when in the country, he was fain to stop his ears with cotton, and, finding even that insufficient, with kneaded crumbs of bread. For rustic sounds, amid deep stillness, are an affliction to nerves thus disordered. And to such a victim, not less than to extreme old age, it may be too truly said, that the grasshopper is~ a burden. The chafing spirit resents the rural diapason, like Vargrave in Owen Meredith's poemWith dull tone

Of importance, thro' cities of rose and carnation,

Went the bee on his business from station to station.
The minute mirth of summer was shrill all around;
Its incessant small voices like stings seemed to sound
On his sore angry sense.†

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(Vargrave's, not the bee's.) To recur to Sidney Walker: it is touching to note the frequency and urgency of his appeals to his friends to secure for him some quiet lodging; meaning thereby, a room altogether free from street and house noises, and looking on nothing but what is green." "I am harassed by continual deprivation of rest, and feel the want of quiet, though but for a little while." Such passages abound in his correspondence. Nor are his Poems void of allusions to this morbid susceptibility to every-day sounds in this workyday world.

As when of old, return'd

From London's never-ebbing multitude
And everlasting cataract of sound,

'Midst the broad, silent courts of Trinity

I stood, and paused; so strange, and strangely sweet
The night-like stillness of that noontide scene

Sank on my startled ear.

So again in the fragment beginning

'Tis utter night; over all Nature's works
Silence and rest are spread; yet still the tramp
Of busy feet, the roll of wheels, the hum

Of passing tongues,-one endless din confused
Of sounds. that have no meaning for the heart,t-
Marring the beauty of the tranquil hour,

Press on my sleepless ear.

ar.§

Who but recognises piteous truthfulness and bitter reality in the wail

Saturday Review, vol. xvii. p. 48.

† Lucille, canto iii.

[Query as to that-unless the heart be diseased.] § Poetical Remains of W. S. Walker, pp. 38, 81.

my

of Mrs. Gaskell's dying factory girl, at sickening "in this dree place, wi' them mill-noises in my ears for ever, until I could scream out for them to stop, and let me have a little piece o' quiet" ?* And who but infers a touch of personal experience in Charlotte Brontè's picture of Lucy Snowe leaving the classe, and running down without bonnet to the bottom of the long garden, and then lingering amongst the stripped shrubs, in the forlorn hope that the postman's ring might occur while she was out of hearing, and she be spared the thrill which some particular nerve or nerves, almost gnawed through with the unremitting tooth of a fixed idea, were becoming wholly unfit to support: "I muffled head in my apron, and stopped my ears in terror of the torturing clang." Mr. Wilkie Collins pictures in Basil a similar over-tension of the nervous system: "The faintest sound from the street now terrified-yes, literally terrified me. The whistling of the wind made me start up in bed, with my head throbbing, and my blood all chill. When no sounds were audible, then I listened for them to come-listened breathlessly, without daring to move." Here the disease is transitory and acute. In the case of another character, already referred to, in this author's "Woman in White," the disease-only Mr. Collins would not allow it, in his case, to be one is chronic, and incurable. The selfish Sybarite in question is meant, no doubt, to belong to the class of fractious malcontents satirised by Cowper

Some fretful tempers wince at every touch,

You always do too little or too much :

You speak with life in hopes to entertain,
Your elevated voice goes through the brain;
You fall at once into a lower key,

That's worse-the drone-pipe of an humble bee.§

But, after all, may not the disease, where it really exists-the disease from which Morose suffered, or thought he suffered (and there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so)-may not this complaint be at once acute and chronic? Where the nervous system, for instance, is exhausted by intense and prolonged pain? See how continually Horace Walpole, when disabled by gout, keeps recurring, in his letters, to his morbid susceptibility to noise. Affected he may have been, but the fastidious virtuoso of Strawberry Hill was not all affectation; and, for our part, and pour raison, we do and must feel for and feel with him, in this matter. My nerves are so aspen, that the smallest noise disturbed me," he tells Mr. Cole. Next year he assures Lady Ossory, "I am so demolished, decayed, and so nervous, that the clapping of a door makes me quiver like a poplar." Risum teneatis, O Muscular Christians? Possibly the Countess of Ossory herself laughed a little in her sleeve, and ventured on an ironically innocent query about the door-clapping in her ladyship's reply to Horatio. For in his rejoinder we read: "Your ladyship asked me in your last, whether it was the situation of public affairs [1780] that affected my nerves: to be sure there would be more Roman dignity in answering, Yes; but something less than truth. I fear one's country is never so near one's heart that the clapping of a door

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gives it a palpitation." And then Horace repeats his report of the "trepidation" that the least noise, from door slamming downwards, produces on his nerves.-Later again, he writes to his namesake, Sir Mann, "I am grieved to hear you complain of your nerves, and know how to pity you. My own are so shattered, that the sudden clapping of a door makes me tremble for some minutes." But next year Horace of Strawberry Hill learns from a nephew of Horace of Florence, the kind and degree of that diplomatic uncle's nervousness, and recants his pity. "He says you have no complaint but a little trembling of your hand. I, who am so nervous that the sudden clapping of a door makes me shudder all over, call that nothing.'

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It is easy for a burly body, nothing easier, perhaps nothing more natural-to gird at our elderly Horace, trepidating and palpitating, whensoever a door creaks in opening, and à fortiori whensoever a door is slammed in shutting. But to this complexion the burliest may come at last. Let but disease tell on the nerves, and your stalwart, robust, boisterous, big fellow may be transfigured into the same image. Few men have surpassed Scott in physical vigour, and natural superiority to nervous weaknesses. He could be scornfully impatient of the fine-lady susceptibility that found aught to annoy in the scream of a scolding parrot. But the day came-very near the end, it is true-when stout Sir Walter found street sounds intolerable. On the last day of the last January he lived to see, he went to Edinburgh on business, and, for the first time in his native town, took up his quarters at a hotel. "But the noise of the street," his son-in-law tells us, "disturbed him during the night (another evidence how much his nervous system had been shattered), and next day he was persuaded to remove to his bookseller's house in Athol-crescent."+ Few are the authors who could write on, like Jean Paul, amid the turmoil of household work, all going on in the same poor room with him. Happy the author that can't sympathise with Hood, in his inability to write except on condition of surrounding silence. "I have a room to myself," he exultingly writes, in 1841, from his new lodgings at Camberwell," which will be worth 201. a year to me, for a little disconcerts my nerves." And his son records Mrs. Hood's care to secure quiet in the house-so that " we children were brought up in a sort of Spartan style of education, and taught the virtues of silence and low voices."§ The tender wife's solicitude reminds us of "faithful Peggy" in a forgotten poem of almost (but not quite) forgotten Jane Taylor:

When Philip wrote he never seem'd so well,
-Was startled even if a cinder fell,
And quickly worried;-Peggy saw it all,
And felt the shock herself if one did fall.]

The approach of brain disease, we are told by "the faculty," is often heralded by the most marvellous exaltation of sensuous susceptibilities. Dr. Elliotson mentions a patient who, "previous to an attack of hemi

* Walpole's Letters, complete edition, vol. vii. pp. 204, 307, 320, 366; vol. viii. p. 97.

† Lockhart's Life of Scott, ch. lxxix.

Memorials of Thomas Hood, vol. ii. p. 87.
Poetical Remains of Jane Taylor, ii. 9.

§ Ibid., p. 67.

plegia, felt such an extraordinary acuteness of hearing, that he heard the least sound at the bottom of his house." In another case, a gentleman, previous to an attack of inflammation of the brain, remarked to his son that he could hear a conversation that was taking place in a distant part of the house, when those around him could not even distinguish voices. "In this condition of brain the avenues by which the outward world is brought in connexion with the inward man are thrown open so widely that it would seem as though the unhappy person projected his special organs of sense outward until they absolutely came in contact with the objects or manifestations submitted to them."* So Thomson incidentally says, or sings, that were man's ear open to all the sounds uttered by microscopic millions, which, "concealed by the kind art of Heaven, escape the grosser eye of man," he would be tortured by the diapason,

-and in dead night,

When silence sleeps o'er all, be stunned with noise.†

It is incidentally remarked by John Locke, while arguing that the all-wise Architect of this Cosmos has suited our organs, and the bodies that are to affect them, one to another,-that, if our sense of hearing were but one thousand times quicker than it is, "how would a perpetual noise distract us!" and we should, in the quietest retirement, be less able to sleep or meditate, than in the middle of a sea-fight. Degrees of disease may approximate a man's condition more and more nearly to this intolerable hypothesis;-a consideration which should make the sound and strong a little forbearing towards sufferers in all the manifold degrees of functional derangement or organic disease.

QUEEN HORTENSE-MOTHER OF NAPOLEON III.§

HORTENSE-EUGÉNIE, mother of the present Emperor of the French, was the daughter of the Empress Josephine by a former husband-M. de Beauharnais and she was sister to Eugène Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy. The marriage of Josephine, who was a Mademoiselle de la Pagerie, with the Viscount Beauharnais, and of which these two children were issue, was not a happy one, and Madame de Beauharnais withdrew for a time to the society of her family at La Martinique. Driven back to her own country, she there learnt that her husband, who had severed family and monarchical ties for the Revolution, was, by a caprice not a little characteristic of such movements, about to be sent to the scaffold

See Essay on "First Beginnings," in vol. v. of the Cornhill Magazine-à propos of Dr. Forbes Winslow on Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind. †The Seasons, Summer.

Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, book ii. ch. xxiii. § 12. § La Reine Hortense. Par E. Fourmestraux. Auteur d'une étude sur Napoléon III.

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