while he kept philandering on the mountains with the snows and his woes.
There are plenty of such cures for a melancholy not yet incurable; change
of air, scene, food, amusement, and occupation being the best. True, the
Romans tried this, as Seneca and Lucretius tells us, and found themselves
as much bored as ever. "No easier nor no quicker passed th'
impracticable hours." But the Romans were very extreme cases.

When the cause of melancholy is religious or moral, there is little to be
done with the victim. In "Sartor Resartus" he will read how Mr. Carlyle
cured himself, if ever he was cured. To be brief, he said, "What then,
who cares?" and indeed, in more reverent form of expression, it is all
that can be said. When Nicias addressed the doomed and wasted remnant of
the Athenian expedition to Syracuse, he told them that "others, too,
being men, had borne things which had to be endured." That is the whole
philosophy of the matter.



THACKERAY'S LONDON.


A house in a highly respectable square, where Jeames Yellowplush was in
service, had recently the fame of being haunted. No one knew exactly
what haunted this desirable mansion, or how, though a novelist was
understood to have supplied a satisfactory legend. The young man who
"investigated" the ghost rang the bell thrice violently, and then fell
down dead, nor could he in any wise satisfy the curiosity of his friends.
That fable is exploded. It was what is called an "aetiological myth;" by
the learned it was merely a story devised to account for the fact that
the house was not occupied. The imagination of man, confronted by so