She was growing more composed, and had risen to go to her own room, when Mr. Leicester entered. She sat down again, vexed that he should observe, which he could not fail to do, the traces of emotion on her face. "I bring you a message from my sister," he said. “She finds more to look to, at home, than she anticipated, and will not be able to return before dinner: not until late in the evening." Susan's state of feeling was such, that she dared not speak. Her heart and eyes were brimful, and running over. And now to be told that Mrs. Freeman would not be back till night: all those hours alone in the house with Mr. Carnagie! "You do not look well, Miss Chase," he observed: "well or happy." The tears must come; there was no help for it, and they rained down; but she managed to steady her voice. "Mr. Leicester, you were kind enough, before my illness came on, to give me an invitation to your house. I wish I could be moved there." "It is the very thing I and Mrs. Freeman have been speaking of today," he answered, pleasure beaming from his eyes. "We think the change would be most desirable. As soon as you shall be a little stronger, Mrs. Freeman can return home, and you with her." "I am strong enough now," answered Susan, and her tone struck Mr. Leicester as being one of painful eagerness. "Let me come at once, this afternoon. I cannot walk so far yet, but Jicko can drive me in the carriage. I shall not trouble you for long," she continued, "for I shall sail by the next packet." "Oh no, indeed," he interrupted, answering her last sentence, "the next packet goes in a few days; we must keep you longer with us than that. Putting other considerations aside, you would not be strong enough to undertake the voyage." "Strong or weak, I must go," she replied; "I cannot remain in Barbadoes. I wish I had never come to it." "I hope nothing unpleasant has happened," he said, speaking with hesitation. "No," returned Susan, evasively, "nothing particular. Only-after -after the step my sister has taken, it is not agreeable to me to meet Mr. Carnagie. I shall be truly thankful for the shelter of your house and protection until I sail: and perhaps some time, in England, opportunity will be afforded us of returning your kind hospitality." "Dear Miss Chase," he said, in a low tone," need you sail at all ?" Susan looked at him. Was he going to plead for Mr. Carnagie? No; he was going to plead for himself; and the warm colour rushed into the wan face of Susan. Perhaps she had half suspected that he might some time do it. "You propose to honour my house for a temporary visit; to accept of my temporary protection: oh, Miss Chase, may I not ask you to accept of them for all time? I have admired and loved you ever since we met, and my dearest wish has long been that the future shall see you my wife. Let me hope for it!" What with one offer and another, Susan was certainly confounded. She did not, in consequence, answer so readily as she might have done. "My sister is soon to marry Mr. Grape," he resumed: "I mention it, lest you might deem her being with me an impediment: but she probably has told you. All that the most tender "I beg your pardon, Mr. Leicester," interrupted Susan, recovering her senses; (6 pray do not continue: it will only be painful to us both. I feel sensibly your good opinion of me; your kind offer; and I thank you, but I can only decline it. Firmly and irrevocably decline it." "Have you another attachment?" he asked, with a saddened eye, and flushed face. "No, indeed but that is nothing to the purpose. It is impossible for me to entertain your offer. Please do not recur to the subject again." He sat silent a few minutes; he saw there was no hope for him: that she meant what she said; and, with a sigh, he prepared to depart. "Then I will go back now, and tell my sister to expect you?" Susan looked at him and hesitated. After what had just passed, would he like her to become his guest? she was asking herself. Mr. Leicester's thoughts were quick. "Yes-if "I am going up the country on a mission," he hastened to say. "I start this evening, and shall be away some days. I am sure Mrs. Freeman will strive to make you comfortable, both for me and herself." How Susan thanked him in her heart. He held out his hand. "I may not see you again, Miss Chase. May the blessing of Heaven go with you, wherever you may be. Fare you well." "Farewell, and thank you for all," was her tearful response, as she returned his hand's fervent clasp. She watched him away, and then she stepped on to the verandah, called to Jicko, and ordered him to get the carriage ready. Next she proceeded to her chamber, gave directions to Brillianna about sending her things after her to Mrs. Freeman's, and then she sat down and wrote a brief note to Mr. Carnagie. Before she had well finished it, Jicko and the carriage came round. Susan tottered down the steps of the verandah, entered the carriage, and so quitted Lieutenant Carnagie's roof for ever. Within a week, she was in her berth, on board the good ship, which was ploughing the waves on its way to England. And that was all the recompense and the satisfaction that Susan Chase obtained by her wellintentioned but ill-starred visit to Barbadoes. NOTES ON NOTE-WORTHIES, OF DIVERS ORDERS, EITHER SEX, AND EVERY AGE. BY SIR NATHANIEL. And make them men of note (do you note, men?)-Love's Labour's Lost, Act IIL. Sc. 1. D. Pedro. Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument, Balth. Do it in notes. Note this before my notes, There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting. D. Pedro. Why these are very crotchets that he speaks, Much Ado About Nothing, Act II. Sc. 3. And these to Notes are frittered quite away.-Dunciad, Book I. Notes of assent, notes of interrogation.-Amen Corner, c. iii. X.-HIPPOCRATES. HIPPOCRATES? But was there ever such a person? Can he not be explained away, transformed into a vanishing quantity, almost every item of his totality eliminated in its turn, until the totality itself, made small by degrees and beautifully less, disappears in the distance? Modern inquirers have addressed themselves to the task of sifting the true from the false, fact from fiction, in the life of the Father of Medicine. M. Paul de Rémusat refers, for instance, to the labours respectively of Herr Petersen, of M. Littré, M. Houdart, and M. Daremberg-each of whom has succeeded in casting doubt on some one of the dates, or the events, in the career of Hippocrates, the result being that nothing can be affirmed with certainty concerning his life and travels. So that, M. de Rémusat confesses, for his part, one might be almost tempted to deny the ancient leech's very existence, amid such a chaos of uncertainties and contradictions, just as Wolf has denied the existence of Homer; but if the best proof of the existence of God consists in the existence of the world and its orderly government, the only means of proving that this or that poet or physician has lived, is to recal his poems or his medical teachings -which is just what can be done in the cases of Homer and Hippocrates. Agreed, that the Hippocratic Collection of doctrines includes treatises by writers who lived at different periods, and wrote in different styles, and adopted different views of physiology and medicine; yet in that collection are to be found certain works which betray the hand of a man of genius, works marked by that unity of doctrine and manner which can be only attributed to one single and master mind. Him it is, ce grand médecin, as Rémusat contends, that we are to admire, whether we call him Hippocrates or not, whether his birthplace may have been Cos or Athens, whether it may have been of him or of some one else that Plato spoke, *Les Sciences Naturelles: Etudes sur leur Histoire et sur leurs plus récents Progrès. Paris: Michel Lévy. 1857. and whether it may have been himself or his grandfather that Artaxerxes summoned to the Persian court, and sought to honour with many honours. The received account informs us that the family of Hippocrates followed the pursuit of medicine for nearly three hundred years, and produced seven physicians, "who attained considerable celebrity, and who are supposed to have written the numerous treatises which are commonly attributed to Hippocrates alone."* He who now stands forth as the Head of the Family, the Representative Man of the Hippocratic clan, is said to have been born at Cos, B.C. 460—a rectilineal descendant from Hercules on his father's side, and of Esculapius on his mother's. The above date (given by Soranus) agrees well enough with what is reported of the principal events in his life-making him a little younger than Socrates and a little older than Plato, who introduces him in his Dialogues, and assigns him a place among the Asclepiade of the temple of Cos-those Asclepiade to whom the science of medicine is confessedly indebted for a separate existence, and thereby a prosperous progress in its newly defined route. According to Soranus, in his work on the lives and sects of "the faculty," Hippocrates studied medicine under his father and Herodicus, and philosophy under the sophist Gorgias and that broadgrinner Democritus, whom he subsequently accepted as a patient, and made whole of his disease. Perdiccas, King of Macedonia, was for a while the physician's host; and Thrace and Scythia, Egypt and Asia Minor, are among the countries said to have benefited by the physician's presence. He died at Larissa, in Thessaly, at an advanced age-by some stated at eighty-five, by others at no less than one hundred and twenty years. Possibly he died younger than the lowest and more likely of these figures. Pliny and Lucian, it has been remarked, have both written a dissertation on long-lived men; and while they cite Carneades, who died at eighty-five; Xenocrates, who died at eighty-four; Plato, at eighty; and others; they take no notice of our alleged centenarian and upwards, Hippocrates of Cos. In effect, all that is known of him, is, that he travelled a good deal, practised medicine for a considerable period, and enjoyed no small reputation during his own lifetime.† Euripides quotes a phrase from one of his books, in a piece now known only in fragments. Aristophanes speaks of him in the "Clouds," by the side of Socrates. Plato mentions him in the "Protagoras," refers to his lectures and their eloquence, frequently puts his name in the mouth of Socrates, and has not disdained, in the "Phædrus," to borrow some thoughts and arguments from him. His writings prove that he was consulted by some of the wealthiest and most illustrious families in Thessaly; and that from Athens itself inquirers came to Cos to hear him enunciate his own doctrines, and assail those of his rival Euryphon, the chief of the school of Cnidus. Cabanis remarks that Hippocrates had the advantage of being the seventeenth médecin of his race-a race which, from father to son, had been accumulating observations, the aggregate of which, sagaciously pursued and carefully preserved, must at length have become a heritage * Engl. Cyclopædia. of no slight value. Of this heirloom, Hippocrates, we may be sure, made a profitable use. His own diligence led him to travel in every country where civilisation promised a reward for zealous scrutiny, and to copy the histories of diseases, suspended on the columns in the temples of Esculapius and Apollo; while he availed himself, moreover, of whatever seemed happy in the ideas of the rival school of Cnidus. Then, having ransacked every collection within reach, and enriched himself with the spoils of his predecessors and his contemporaries, he set himself to the task of observing for himself, and this with a breadth and accuracy of inductive philosophy, memorable indeed in old-world records. His principles, as defined by a recent commentator, were those of "rational empiricism." That is to say, he did not "attempt to form his theories from à priori reasoning, but he observed the phenomena of nature and deduced from them such conclusions as these phenomena would justify." Not that he kept very strictly to this principle, or was a miracle of consistency, any more than other precursors of the Inductive school. But his reputation mainly depends on the accuracy with which he observed a malady's mixed modes, and the graphic particularity with which he described what he saw. Medical writers still refer with admiring assent to such descriptive fragments as the following: "We may recognise the presence of empyema by these general signs:-if the fever does not remit, but is moderate during the day and increased at night, and considerable perspirations occur, and there is great inclination to cough and but little expectoration; while the eyes become hollow, the cheeks are flushed, the finger-nails curved, and the fingers hot, especially the tips, and the feet swell, and pustules are formed over the body-these symptoms denote chronic empyema, and may be greatly relied on." The style in which he wrote was singularly free from verbiage or diffuseness; indeed, its concise character has been complained of as occasionally involving obscurity, so careful was he against overloading his meaning, or forestalling his distant successors in the pomp of polysyllabic augment, big words, big looks, big wigs, And the nice conduct of a clouded cane, gold-headed, thick-tasseled, and ponderous exceedingly. His notions of anatomy were, of course, comparatively crude. Ancient superstition, as M. de Rémusat observes, was opposed to the dissection of corpses. Vesalius, in the fifteenth century, was obliged to conceal his studies, in terror of committing sacrilege. Scarcely two hundred years ago, dissection was still a rare occurrence, permission being stintedly granted by the police. In Hippocratic times it was usual to bury the dead without delay, and a law to which Antigone alludes in Euripides directed that they should be honourably treated and interred within twenty-four hours. But whether it was that laws of this kind were not always in existence, or that they were practically ignored, certain it seems that Hippocrates must have dissected other than animal remains, and observed the human frame oftener and better than was allowed by the wounds of a few soldiers merely. M. Littré and M. Daremberg+ * Euvres complètes d'Hippocrate, traduction nouvelle, &c., par E. Littré. 1839-53. † Euvres choisies d'Hippocrate, traduites par le Dr. Ch. Daremberg. 1855. |