extreme old age, and in the full vigour of youth
a sudden injury to the brain might for ever
destroy the intellect of a Plato or a Shakespeare.
But the third principle—the soul—the something
lodged within the body, which yet was to survive
it? Where was that soul hid out of the ken of
the anatomist? When philosophers attempted to
define it, were they not compelled to confound
its nature and its actions with those of the mind?
Could they reduce it to the mere moral sense,
varying according to education, circumstances,
and physical constitution? But even the moral
sense in the most virtuous of men may be swept
away by a fever. Such at the time I now speak
of were the views I held. Views certainly
not original nor pleasing; but I cherished them
with as fond a tenacity as if they had been
consolatory truths of which I was the first
discoverer. I was intolerant to those who maintained
opposite doctrines—despised them as irrational, or
disliked them as insincere. Certainly if I had
fulfilled the career which my ambition predicted—
become the founder of a new school in pathology,
and summed up my theories in academical
lectures, I should have added another authority,
however feeble, to the sects which circumscribe
the interests of man to the life that has its close
in his grave.

Possibly that which I have called my
intellectual pride was more nourished than I should
have been willing to grant by that self-reliance
which an unusual degree of physical power is
apt to bestow. Nature had blessed me with the
thews of an athlete. Among the hardy youths
of the Northern Athens I had been pre-eminently
distinguished for feats of activity and strength.
My mental labours, and the anxiety which is
inseparable from the conscientious responsibilities of
the medical profession, kept my health below the
par of keen enjoyment, but had in no way
diminished my rare muscular force. I walked through
the crowd with the firm step and lofty crest of
the mailed knight of old, who felt himself, in his
casement of iron, a match against numbers.
Thus the sense of a robust individuality, strong
alike in disciplined reason and animal vigour—
habituated to aid others, needing no aid for itself
—contributed to render me imperious in will and
arrogant in opinion. Nor were such defects
injurious to me in my profession; on the
contrary, aided as they were by a calm manner, and
a presence not without that kind of dignity which
is the livery of self-esteem, they served to impose
respect and to inspire trust.

CHAPTER II.

I HAD been about six years at L—— when I
became suddenly involved in a controversy with
Dr. Lloyd. Just as this ill-fated man appeared
at the culminating point of his professional
fortunes, he had the imprudence to proclaim himself
not only an enthusiastic advocate of mesmerism,
as a curative process, but an ardent believer of
the reality of somnambular clairvoyance as an
invaluable gift of certain privileged organisations.
To these doctrines I sternly opposed myself—
the more sternly, perhaps, because on these
doctrines Dr. Lloyd founded an argument for the
existence of soul, independent of mind, as of
matter, and built thereon a superstructure of
physiological phantasies, which, could it be
substantiated, would replace every system of
metaphysics on which recognised philosophy
condescends to dispute.

About two years before he became a disciple
rather of Puysegur than Mesmer (for Mesmer
had little faith in that gift of clairvoyance of
which Puysegur was, I believe, the first
audacious asserter), Dr. Lloyd had been afflicted with
the loss of a wife many years younger than
himself, and to whom he had been tenderly attached.
And this bereavement, in directing the hopes
that consoled him to a world beyond the grave,
had served perhaps to render him more credulous
of the phenomena in which he greeted additional
proofs of purely spiritual existence. Certainly,
if, in controverting the notions of another
physiologist, I had restricted myself to that fair
antagonism which belongs to scientific disputants,
anxious only for the truth, I should need no
apology for sincere conviction and honest
argument; but when, with condescending good
nature, as if to a man much younger than
himself, who was ignorant of the phenomena
which he nevertheless denied, Dr. Lloyd
invited me to attend his séances and witness his
cures, my amour propre became roused and
nettled, and it seemed to me necessary to put
down what I asserted to be too gross an outrage
on common sense to justify the ceremony of
examination. I wrote, therefore, a small pamphlet
on the subject, in which I exhausted all the
weapons that irony can lend to contempt. Dr. Lloyd
replied, and as he was no very skilful arguer, his
reply injured him perhaps more than my assault.
Meanwhile, I had made some inquiries as to the
moral character of his favourite clairvoyants. I
imagined that I had learned enough to justify me
in treating them as flagrant cheats—and himself
as their egregious dupe.

Low Town soon ranged itself, with very few
exceptions, on my side. The Hill at first seemed
disposed to rally round its insulted physician,
and to make the dispute a party question, in
which the Hill would have been signally worsted,
when suddenly the same lady paramount, who had
secured to Dr. Lloyd the smile of the Eminence,
spoke forth against him, and the Eminence
frowned.

"Dr. Lloyd," said the Queen of the Hill, "is
an amiable creature, but on this subject decidedly
cracked. Cracked poets may be all the better for
being cracked;—cracked doctors are dangerous.
Besides, in deserting that old-fashioned routine,
his adherence to which made his claim to the
Hill's approbation; and unsettling the mind of
the Hill with wild revolutionary theories, Dr.
Lloyd has betrayed the principles on which the
Hill itself rests its social foundations. Of those
principles Dr. Fenwick has made himself