direction, recalled them, leaned back in his seat
and looked steadily at the man whose life was in
his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin
the rope, grind the axe, and hammer the nails
into the scaffold.

GOOD QUALITIES OF GOUT.

WHEN I say gout, I don't mean rheumatism.
A variety of endeavours have been made to
define the difference between gout and rheumatism.
Thus: Gout is rich man's rheumatism, and
rheumatism is poor man's gout; which is good only
as a figure of speech. Another: Put your toe in
a vice; turn the screw till you can bear the
pain no longer; that's rheumatism. Give the
screw one turn more; that's gout. In every
respect, gout takes precedence. Just as,
grammatically speaking, the masculine gender is
"more worthy" than the feminine, and the
feminine more worthy than the neuter (I should
think so!) so is gout more worthy than
rheumatism, and rheumatism more worthy than the
low, vagabond pains and aches which John
Kemble sought to dignify by calling them Hs.

Rheumatic gout may be assumed to be no real
gout at all, but either pure rheumatism or
rheumatic fever. There is no such thing as gouty
rheumatism; which is simply a contradiction
of terms. It is possible, however, for gout
and rheumatism to be co-resident in the same
patient, just as it is possible for a white man
and a black man to be fellow-lodgers in the
same boarding-house, on this side of the
Atlantic. Gout is strictly confined to the joints;
rheumatism has no objection to a sojourn amongst
the muscles. For instance, it will play tricks
with your intercostal (mid-rib) muscles, frightening
you with false terrors of heart disease. Gout
comes to a regular crisis: it has its rise, its
culminating point, and its decline and fall: it is
the barleycorn-note of the practised vocalist,
swelling and then dying upon the sense.
Rheumatism may oscillate up and down, backward
or forward; may advance or retreat capriciously;
but it has no critical point, no fortissimo, the
arrival of which is a guarantee and preparation
for a sure and certain diminuendo. Gout is a
generous, warm-hearted fellow, who, if he
quarrels now and then, has a good stand-up
fight, and has done with it. Rheumatism does
not fire up so easily; but, when once he has taken
a grudge against you, he never forgets it; his
malignant passions never cease to rankle; his
memory is long, for evil. When you think you
have shaken hands with him, he will undeceive
you by some secret ill-natured pinch. He will
stab you in the back at your own dinner-table.

Gout is a summer interspersed with thunderstorms,
which nevertheless can boast its genial
days and weeks. Rheumatism is the settled bad
weather, all the year round, enjoyed by the
natives of the Hebrides, whose meteorological
variety consists in the different blackness or
whiteness of their squalls, and the angle of
inclination (lying somewhere between ten and
ninety degrees) at which their rain-drops impinge
on the ground. Rheumatism is the vile Old
Man of the Sea, who insidiously instals himself
upon your shoulder, and who never looses his
hold entirely, although he may relax it from
time to time. Gout is a mighty but irascible
genius, who occasionally opens the flood-gates
of his wrath; but who, as soon as the tempest
is over, descends with dignity to his retreat at
the bottom of the sea.

When Xerxes offered a reward. for a new
pleasure, it is a pity he did not first think of
asking his physicians to give him a taste of the
gout. He would have found its departure—
duly preceded by its arrival and its stay—the
most agreeable sensation he ever felt in his life.
For gout is a gentlemanly and accommodating
visitor, not dangerous upon the whole: you may
enjoy the advantage of his company often and
often, without apprehension of any untoward
result. It cannot be denied that unlooked-for
accidents will now and then occur; but they are
the exceptions rather than the rule. They are
treacherous and shabby tricks which Death
maliciously plays off on Gout to put him out of
favour with the sons of men. Many and many
people are in the habit of receiving Gout in their
houses, all their lives long, till he becomes quite
an old and respected acquaintance (to despise
him is impossible), and yet receive their death-
stroke from some other enemy. They die, not
of Gout's ill-treatment, but because Gout cannot
come to their rescue and drive out the new
intruder, who has broken into the premises with
malice prepense. Count the total number of
fits of the gout which come off in Europe in
twenty-five years with the actual deaths with
which Gout stands really and truly chargeable
during the same period, and the proportion is
reduced to an infinitesimal fraction: to all but
snow-white innocence.

Gout introduces you to a variety of new
sensations and new ideas which otherwise would be
closed to you; and consequently enlarges your
views of life. You have heard of the village
stocks (once a national institution); but you
have no notion what it is to be in the stocks.
Gout will enlighten your ignorance, by laying
you flat on your back so that you could not stir
for your life if the house caught fire. He will
then put your feet into his own private stocks
(made of burning iron). As a further improvement,
he will set on a few of his private pack
of pitiless dogs with red-hot teeth, to gnaw
at your toes till you exclaim, "Don't talk to me
of the village stocks as a punishment! They
were nothing to this."

You have heard of the torture-boots of the
Inquisitors and others, but you have never
seen nor felt one. Gout will bring his boot
and draw it up tight as far as your knee; next,
he will drive in some heated wedges, tapping
them constantly with a nice little hammer, to
prevent your forgetting they are there, till at
last you lose your dignity, and shout aloud.
When the performance is over, and Gout's
boot is taken off, your late experiment suggests
the remark, " I could not have believed