given in small quantities, gradually increasing
both its amount and its strength; the patients
are subjected to good ventilation, are frequently
washed, and made to take exercise in proportion
to their strength. Under the influence of this
purely hygienic treatment, whole families were
insensibly restored to life.

Observers who have written on scrofula are
agreed that its grand cause (the conditions of
age being favourable) is scanty food, both in
quality and quantity. It is also brought on by
bodily inaction, by want of exercise. Factory
labour, in opposition to working in the fields, is
one of the most active generators of scrofula.
It has been established from well authenticated
facts, that in great cities, such as London and
Paris, scrofula attacks more girls than boys,
the preponderance being estimated at two-
thirds. This result is easily understood. In
large towns, sedentary labour mostly falls to
the female share. If those conditions be
changed—as in some parts of Switzerland,
where the men devote themselves to watch-
making, while the women execute the rough
tasks of the fields—the proportion is reversed,
and it is the men who supply scrofula with its
most numerous contingent.

One of the worst forms of scrofula—rachitism,
or rickets—as has been proved by experiments
on animals and observations on human patients
—arises under the influence of chilly dwellings
and insufficient alimentation. Thus, if you
deprive a month-old babe of milk, and try to
supply its place with meal and broth, there
is an evident deficit of warmth-giving nutriment,
and rickets constantly come on—unless
some other complaint, supervening, carry off
beforehand the injudiciously-fed infant. Again:
What is the specific remedy, or rather the
specific aliment, for rickets? Cod-liver oil.
And is not cod-liver oil the alimentary
substance which is the richest in heat-giving
elements?

Well-constituted children may become scrofulous,
if they fall from affluence into poverty. A
sad example suffices to prove that scrofula is a
complaint which may be taken by being placed
in bad conditions. Poor little Louis the
Seventeenth, although previously enjoying admirable
health, changed so quickly and so completely
under the barbarous treatment of Simon the
shoemaker, that Desaux did not recognise the
descendant of kings after his transformation by
misery. The surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu, accustomed
as he was to sympathise with the sorrows
of the poor, was deeply affected by his visit to
that wretched lad—a specimen of adversity's
levelling power.

It is worth while to draw a distinction
between real poverty and physiological poverty.
Grammatically speaking, poverty means the
compulsory privation of the necessaries of life,
in consequence of inadequate resources; but
there are many circumstances under which
privation does not result from inadequate resources,
but from conditions of organisation which do
not allow a sufficient reparation of the animal
economy. This is the poverty of wealth, starvation
in the midst of abundance.

A young  lady living in opulence, whose
caprices are increased by being forestalled, may
fall into loss of appetite or taste for unwholesome
food, and so drift into the weakly condition
which leads to pulmonary consumption.
It is a case of physiological poverty contrasting
with apparent abundance and luxury. Slow
and incomplete convalescences, such as follow
typhoid fevers and severe measles, if prolonged,
may be considered acute forms of physiological
poverty. After grand operations, frightful
burns, when profuse suppuration exhausts the
frame, if the digestive powers continue languid
and the reparation is insufficient to make up
for the loss, the same kind of poverty occurs, in
spite of all the indulgences with which wealth
may surround the individual. Or, we have
only to imagine a man, amidst the splendours
of fortune, but a prey to violent and lasting
grief—and such instances are met with in the
world—with appetite destroyed, strength
diminished, nutrition languishing, and his losses
unrepaired, and we have another form of
physiological poverty co-existing with unlimited
means.

AT THE OPENING OF THE ROYAL
DRAMATIC COLLEGE.

I LIKE to meet actors off the stage—not that
I am possessed with the fond idea of the stage-
struck youth, that all actors are gods, and all
actresses goddesses of supernatural beauty
(which I have long admitted to be an error),
but because it has been my lot to be thrown
a good deal into their society, and because,
knowing them well and intimately, I have learned
to respect them. There are certain actors and
actresses whose hands I am always proud to shake,
not because they are eminent tragedians or
comedians, but because they are honourable men and
women. One of the most simple, unaffected,
generous natures I ever met with, is enshrined
in the breast of a clown. If any Diogenes
should be going about looking for a specimen of
a good husband and a good father, I will give
him the address of a pantaloon; only regretting
that I shall have to request him to ring the top
bell. If I cherish a platonic affection for any
member of the fair sex, it is for an actress
whom everybody loves, because in every
relation of life, as wife, mother, daughter, and
friend, she is as bright an ornament to her sex
as she is to her profession.

Believe me, I am not saying these things in a
spirit of exaggerated charity towards a class
requiring to be apologised for. I am not adopting
the nil nisi bonum maxim, as if I were speaking
of the dead. These good people are alive,
pursuing an honourable career, and doing good
deeds in the sight of many.

I little thought, in my young days, that I
should ever have this opinion of play-actors. In
the sphere, a very narrow one, in which I