afternoon to see the effect of his last prescription, he found her in
such utter prostration of nerves and spirits, that he resolved to hazard
a dose not much known to great ladies--viz. three grains of plain-
speaking, with a minim of frightening.

"My dear lady," said he, "yours is a case in which physicians can be of
very little use. There is something on the mind which my prescriptions
fail to reach; worry of some sort--decidedly worry. And unless you
yourself can either cure that, or will make head against it, worry, my
dear Lady Montfort, will end not in consumption--you are too finely
formed to let worry eat holes in the lungs--no; but in a confirmed
aneurism of the heart, and the first sudden shock might then be
immediately fatal. The heart is a noble organ--bears a great deal--but
still its endurance has limits. Heart-complaints are more common than
they were;--over-education and over-civilisation, I suspect. Very young
people are not so subject to them; they have flurry, not worry--a very
different thing. A good chronic silent grief of some years standing,
that gets worried into acute inflammation at the age when feeling is no
longer fancy, throws out a heart-disease which sometimes kills without
warning, or sometimes, if the grief be removed, will rather prolong than
shorten life, by inducing a prudent avoidance of worry in future. There
is that worthy old gentleman who was taken so ill at Fawley, and about
whom you were so anxious: in his case there had certainly been chronic
grief; then came acute worry, and the heart could not get through its
duties. Fifty years ago doctors would have cried 'apoplexy!'--nowadays
we know that the heart saves the head. Well, he was more easy in his
mind the last time I saw him, and thanks to his temperance, and his
constitutional dislike to self-indulgence in worry, he may jog on to
eighty, in spite of the stethoscope! Excess in the moral emotions gives
heart-disease; abuse of the physical powers, paralysis; both more common