"Is this," I cried, in grief profound, All that remains at forty-four? But, ere I enter'd Cleveland-row, By her you plainly were not known; The Newspaper. CURES for chilblains, corns, and bunnions, Young man absent from his own house, Search for arms in county Kerry, Deals, Honduras, Ponticherry, Treadmill, Haydon, Tom and Jerry. Pall-Mall, Allen, chairs and tables, Major Cartwright, iron cables; Smithfield, price of veal and mutton, Yearly meeting, lots of Quakers, Freehold farm of forty acres ; Duke of Angouleme, despatches, Thatch'd-house tavern, glees and catches; Coburg, wonderful attraction, Plunket, playhouse, Orange faction, Consols eighty and a fraction. Sales of sail-cloth, silk and camblet, Kean in Shylock, Young in Hamlet; Kemble's statue, Hone's petition; Chateaubriand, Cape Madeira, a; Jerry Bentham's lucubrations, Wapping Docks choke full of barter, 1 SYMPATHIES AND PREJUDICES. "You are not young; no more am I: go to, then, there's sympathy. You are merry, so am I; ha! ha! then there's more sympathy. You love sack, and so do I; would you desire better sympathy?" Merry Wives of Windsor. In moral, as well as physical anatomy, there are discases that baffle the sagacity of the dissector. Many of our sympathies, and most of our prejudices, are among the number. Of one thing, however, we may be sure, namely, that the latter are the less dangerous of the two; and it may be well to bear that in mind when attempts at remedy have succeeded to efforts of discovery. This may startle my female readers, to whom sympathy, and sympathies, and sympathizing, are words that sound so sweetly, and to whose ears antipathy" is so loathsome. But let them beware of their favourites, for there is almost always a serpent under the roses. 66 Sympathy and antipathy may be called, in comparison with other qualities, the poetry of sensation. They are quite imaginative, vague, and unreal;-a sort of inspiration, out of all subserviency to rules or reasoning; finding objects without search; and developing themselves in the most unaccountable ways, in beings the least likely to possess them, and on occasions which set conjecture and calculation at defiance. Let us see what we can make out as to the nature of these opposite qualities of sympathies and antipathies, the origin of which defies our speculation. We should, perhaps, begin with antipathies, as of least importance, for their worst effects are rarely of more than negative tendency. Sympathies, on the contrary, lead to absolute and positive ill when injurious at all. A man who feels a natural aversion to eels, spinach, parsnips, Jews, Frenchmen, &c. is, ten to one, deprived of a participation in a very good thing, or of an acquaintance with many a good fellow. But he or she whose sympathies lead him or her to favourite viands, liqueurs, or persons, run risks-which I need not enlarge on. And I must be here understood as not confounding sympathy, in this sense, with compassion-that "sympathy with other's woe," one of the most exquisite feelings of our nature; but as taking the word in its metaphysical meaning, as the secret and involuntary spell which draws us towards objects, in the same proportion and with the same force that antipathy turns us from them. As to the reasonableness of the one or the other, that is out of the question, they being quite beyond the influence of the will or the understanding. I shall, however, give sympathy the precedence in my desultory remarks, because it is the most common, and I believe, with all its faults, the most natural to mankind. Material or physical sympathies may be classed under various heads -general and particular, direct and indirect. Among the former are the relative movements of all the parts of the earth, keeping the whole in harmony, and those which act upon human beings in the mass, and are common to all. The latter include the connexion between the sun, the earth, and other planets; persons attached to each other by some violent passion, such as love, et cetera, et cetera. I am not about to inflict on my readers an astronomical or metaphysical treatise, and shall content myself, on the subject of general sympathies, with citing the most extraordinary instance of them that has ever come to my knowledge, either by reading or experience. "The sweating sickness," a remarkable pestilent distemper, which broke out in England in the year 1551, was attended, as we are told, with some symptoms and circumstances, the belief in which requires such a fund of credibility or gullibility, that I beg to quote my authority, and regret that I cannot at this moment confront him with any of the historians but Hume, who is silent on the subject. "What was more particular was, that no foreigners, though conversant in the most infected places, were seized with it; and also that the English in foreign countries were seized with it at the same time that their native country was infected at home." Without commenting on the tautology or the pleonasms of this sentence, I leave to my readers to form their judgment of the veracity of that prince of lexicography, N. Bailey Adλoyos, who thus speaks in his Dictionary, third edition, with additions, 1737. “It is not necessary nor convenient to dwell on the nature of direct sympathies, passing from one body to another without any intermediate conductor; but of those which may be called indirect, or distant, I am furnished, in the sublime study of animal magnetism, with a valuable instance, gravely cited by a certain Monsieur Tardy de Montravel, in a letter to M. de Puysegur, the celebrated operator in this art. I shall translate the passage. 'About three months ago (the letter bears date Dec. 11th 1785) Mademoiselle M* * * * being in a state of somnambulism, I asked her if she could imagine any method for putting herself in sympathy with a sick person at a considerable distance from her, and whom she had never seen. 'I see nothing for it,' said she, but to make the sick person wear, for eight or ten days, a piece of thick glass, about two inches square, on the pit of his or her stomach; then to send it to me, that I may wear it the same length of time, on the same place. I think that will do the business.' Two months afterwards the Duchess of --, living twenty-five leagues from the residence of Mademoiselle M****, having heard of the cures which I performed by means of magnetism, asked me some information respecting this science. Having given her some general details on the subject, which I considered useful in all cases, I desired her to place on her stomach such a bit of glass as was indicated by Mademoiselle M ****, and to send it to me in the proper time. On the 8th of last month Madame la Duchesse placed, as was prescribed, a bit of looking-glass, wrapped in linen, with the quicksilver well scraped off. She wore it night and day until the 19th, when I having received it from her, sent it immediately to my patient Mademoiselle M****, who wore it on the pit of her stomach from the 21st until the 29th. She, being in a state of somnambulism on the 30th, detailed to me every particular of the illness of the Duchess, whom she saw almost as perfectly as if she was touching her.'" The letter does not, unfortunately, state the result of this sympathetic communication upon the Duchess; but tells us that poor Mademoiselle M *, in addition to her other symptoms, became, from the moment she put the fatal piece of glass on her stomach, subject to the very same species of sufferings in her nerves and joints that had before afflicted her Grace, -which proves what I stated in the beginning of this paper on the dangers of sympathy, particularly to the sex which is the most fair and most susceptible. But I will not press into the service any more of the manifold aids of animal magnetism. I may on some future occasion return to that particular branch of my subject more in detail; and I will therefore for the present avoid all farther consideration of the embarrassing topic of physical sympathies. There is no knowing where it might lead one; and it would be unwise to go voluntarily into a labyrinth for which, at the best, there is no clew. I therefore turn to those moral wonders, continually exhibiting their self-acted miracles in almost every individual of our species. And here I should have been as much confounded as before, had I been thrown, in the enquiry, entirely upon my own resources; but, luckily for me, I have just stumbled over a book "learned in those mysteries," and attributed to a nobleman whose judgment and acumen have enabled him to write on the subject in a somewhat different style, but in a manner quite as successful as that of Locke himself. Following a train of reasoning, meant to prove that "the imagination of one man has a direct atmospheric influence upon the imagination of another," the author proceeds in the thread (rather tangled to be sure) of his argument, and exclaims: "An unfortunate person is he who hath come into contact with more persons antipathetic to him than sympathetic, and whose imaginations have worked in a malignant mood towards him. We say we like or dislike such a person, for they have such or such qualities: that is, the love or hatred is in proportion to the harmony which subsists between the parties; and the harmony depends on the degree of sympathy or antipathy they possess for each other, founded entirely upon their respective configurations, their nervous systems, and their inclinations, acting on each other through the medium of the imagination so that our love or hate is as much out of our power, and as little voluntary, as our catching any other infection. Some men are of such a texture that they are accessible more to the one affection than to the other; but every moral affection may be traced to a physical and necessary cause."-Life and Opinions of Sir Richard Maltravers, vol. i. pp. 194, 195. Now, without combatting this last assertion, or pretending to understand what precedes it, I will venture to express a wish that Sir Richard had made an effort at explaining the physical cause which governs our arbitrary likings and dislikes, instead of contenting himself with the assertion that such exists. For my part, I confess that the metaphysics of Maltravers leave me as much in doubt and dark ness as ever; but I am naturally glad to fly from the perplexities of sympathy, to bewilder myself awhile in the undefined and undefinable difficulties of its opposite. Were antipathies entirely confined to human nature, it might be more ashamed of itself than it has reason to be, considering the actual state of the case. For, sharing as it does its uncontrollable aversions in common with all things animal and vegetable, as well as with the meaner productions of nature, it may console itself in the certainty that these repugnances are quite inseparable from moral as well as material existence, in its most sublime as well as its lowest gradations. Pliny, at the head of the naturalists, points out the animosity existing between stones, even as well as minerals and metals. The diamond, he remarks, is in dissension with the loadstone; while a particular stone of Ethiopia, which he specifies, repulses iron with as much force as the magnet attracts it. Among minerals and metals, gold and mercury unite together with an ardour equal to human friendships; while others oppose and fly off from their associates in the crucible, with as much sputtering and asperity as might be found among the whist-players of the most romantic and unsophisticated village in England. It is the same with plants. The vine has its peculiar attachments and enmities. It can live on excellent terms with the elm, and twines round the appletree with the most insinuating fondness; but the vicinage of a cabbage is mortal to its comfort, and sometimes even to its existence. It is unnecessary to swell the list of vegetable animosities; but let us look for a moment at animal dislikes. We can all understand the feelings that impel the sheep to shun the wolf, or the dove to fly from the kite. It is as needless to ask why, as to demand a reason for the rich man's shrinking from a doctor, or one in health from an attorney. But how are we to account for the terrible lion trembling at the crowing of a cock-the ponderous elephant waddling off at the sight of the ram-or the valiant war-horse shuddering at the odour of the camel? These are the extraordinary facts that force us into the mysteries of occult research, and the study of natural sympathies and dislikes. There can be no doubt that the secret in these instances, where the antipathy is possessed by the whole of one genus against the whole of another, consists in some mystery of organic construction, that we may indulge a hope of seeing one day discovered by Doctor Gall, for the elucidation and developement of his theories of amativeness and combativeness, and the confusion of the sceptics all over the world. To conquer these antipathies is rather the business of custom than reason, another proof of our imperfection, stamping us too plainly "things of habit, and the sport of circumstance." We should, nevertheless, labour to overcome them, and throw ourselves in the way of the best remedies we can find, meeting as often as possible the persons we dislike on the most unreasonable grounds-as manner and appearance, the cut of their coats, or the colour of their eyes. We should read, too, not exactly treatises or sermons, to prove the absurdity, of which we are all sensible, but powerful delineations in poetry or prose of the dangers attending our malady, as well as overdone exhibitions of its effects-for ridicule and caricature are weapons as effective against prejudice, as is wisdom. Who that has read Miss Baillie's "De Montfort" has not shuddered at the possible excess to which he |