tion of the mind upon a single topic, the variety and distinctness of the portraits, the virulence and energy of the abuse, the indifference to the tears of her children-heart-broken that their mother should pass from the world uttering anathemas against all her acquaintances, living and deadmade a strange and fearful exhibition, one more impressive than a thousand sermons to show the danger of indulging an evil passion.

A fatal malady sometimes appears to make a stop-the patient lives and breathes; and his friends, who had considered him as belonging to another world, are overjoyed that he is once more one of themselves. But it is death come under a mask. The lifting up from the grave is followed by a relapse which brings down to it again without return. A son of Dr. Beattie lay sick of a fever, which suddenly left him; the delirium was succeeded by a complete tranquillity, and the father was congratulating himself on the danger being over, when the physicians informed him truly that the end was at hand. Death from hydrophobia is not seldom preceded by similar appearance of recovery. A victim of this disorder, in which every drop of liquid aggravates the convulsions, and the very sound of its trickling is often insupportable, was found by Dr. Latham in the utmost composure, having drank a large jug of porter at a draught. The nurse greeted the physician with the exclamation, "What a wonderful cure!" but in half an hour the man was dead. Sir Henry Halford had seen four or five cases of inflammation of the brain where the raving was succeeded by a lucid interval--the lucid interval by death. One of these was a gentleman who passed three days in a lunatic violence, without an instant's cessation or sleep. He then became rational, settled his affairs, sent messages to his relations, and talked of a sister lately dead, whom he said he should follow immediately, as he did in the course of the night. Many such instances are upon record; and Cervantes must have witnessed something of the kind, or he would not have ventured to restore Don Quixote to reason in his final illness, make him abjure knight-errantry, and die a sensible, as he had lived a worthy, man; for, throughout his adventures, he displays a loftiness of principle and a rectitude of purpose, which give

rarely complete; but a partial intermission, from its comparative ease, creates a considerable change of sensation. Hence the pause in the disorder has received the name of a "lightening before death" a removal of the load of pain and stupor by which the patient was previously oppressed. Shakspeare confines the term to the merriment of mind which usually accompanies the relief. Paley has said, and he wrote after many visitations of gout, that the subsidence of pain is a positive pleasure which few enjoyments can exceed. The observation is sometimes strikingly illustrated in surgical operations, when neither the smarting of the wound, nor the attendant horrors, have the power to disturb the sense of satisfaction which directly ensues. Sir Charles Bell opened the windpipe of a man attacked with spasms of the throat, and who was dying through want of air. The incision closed with the convulsive throbs, and it was necessary to slit out a piece of the cartilage; but when the man, whose face was lately a picture of distress, who streamed with the sweat of suffering, and who toiled and gasped for life, breathed freely through the opening, he fell fast asleep while half-a-dozen candles threw their glare upon his eyes, and the surgeons, with their hands bathed in his blood, were still at work upon the wound, inserting materials to keep it open. A soldier, struck in the temple, at Waterloo, with a musket-ball, had his skull sawn through with a trephine by Mr. Cooper, the author of the "Surgical Dictionary," and a bone pulled out which had been driven half an inch into the substance of the brain. Nearly lifeless before, he instantly sat up, talked with reason and complacency, and rose and dressed the same day. The transition is little less sudden in the "lightening before death;" and though the debility is usually too great for exuberance of spirits, there is sometimes a gentle gayety which would have a contagious charm if it were not the signal of a coming gloom, made a hundred fold more dark by the contrast with the short-lived mirth, never in this world-unless by the tearful eye of memory -to be beheld again.

The moment which converts a sensitive body to inanimate matter is often indistinguishable; but one would hardly think that any who had deliberately contemplated a corpse-icy, stiff, and mo

dier must have been a disciple of the laughterloving Roderick Random, who counterfeited death on his recovery from a fever, and snapped at the fingers of the surgeon as he was closing his eyes. But the more valorous son of Mars had nearly carried the jest too far, when he suffered his jugular vein to be opened before "he played out the play." Zadig, in Voltaire's story, pretends to be dead, to test the affection of his wife; and his friend, who is in the plot, applies immediately for the vacant post, and feigns a pain in his side, which nothing can cure except the application of a dead man's nose. But when the widow, deeming that a living lover is worth more than a departed husband, advances to the coffin with an open razor to take possession of the specific, Zadig is wise enough to cover his nose with one hand, while he thrusts the instrument aside with the other. A man of war, who had the good fortune to recover in a dissecting-room without the aid of the knife, seeing himself surrounded, on opening his eyes, by mutilated bodies, exclaimed, "I perceive that the action has been hot." And if M. Fontenelle had opened his eyes, he might easily have perceived that the anecdote was a jest. Indeed, such is his credulity, that the story of a surgeon addicted to cards, whose death had been tested by bawling in his ears, rising up when a friend whispered in the language of piquet, "a quint, fourteen and the point," has been mistaken by him for an extraordinary case of resuscitation, instead of a common-place joke on the passion for play. The jest-book has always contributed abundant materials to the compilers of horrors. Several anecdotes turn on that inexhaustible theme for merriment-the sorrows of matrimony. In passing through the street a bier was struck against the corner of a house, and the corpse reanimated by the shock. Some years afterwards, when the woman died in good earnest, her husband called to the bearers, "Pray, gentlemen, be careful in turning the corners." Thus there is not even a step from the mirthful to the terrible. The stories, unaltered, do double duty.

Two Parisian merchants, bound together in close friendship, had one a son and the other a daughter, who were friends and something more. The daughter, compelled by her parents to sacrifice her lover for a wealthy suitor, fell into what M. Fontenelle calls an "hysterical syncope," and was buried. Fortune frowns upon lovers that she may enhance the value of her smiles. A strange instinct induced her idorer to disinter the body, and he had the doub e pleasure of delivering the fair one from a horriole death and a hateful husband. Holding that the interment had broken the marriage-tie, they fled to England, but at the end of ten years ventured back to Paris, where the lady was met by the original husband, who, noways surprised that she should have revisited the earth, nor staggered by her denials, laid a formal claim to her in a court of justice. The lover boldly sustained that he who rescued her from death, had

her alive; but the doctrine being new to a court of law, the prudent pair anticipated the decision by returning to England, where they finally terminated their adventures. The plot and morality of the story are thoroughly characteristic of M. Fontenelle's nation, and the simplicity which believes it is not less so of himself. The countrymen of Shakspeare will recognize a French version of Romeo and Juliet. All ladies are not blessed with resurrectionist lovers, but covetousness will sometimes do the work of chivalry. A domestic visited his mistress in her tomb, enticed by a diamond ring, which resisting his efforts to draw it off, he proceeded to amputate the finger. Thereupon the mistress revives, and the domestic drops down dead with alarm: "Thus," says M. Fontenelle, “death had his prey; it was only the victim which was changed." He gives further on a simple story, in which the lady with the ring was supposed to have died in childbirth, and some grave-diggers were the thieves. In the hurry of their flight they left a lantern which served to light the lady to her door. "Who's there?" inquired the girl who answered her knock. "Your mistress," was the reply. The servant needed to hear no more; she rushed into the room where her master was sitting, and informed him that the spirit of his wife was at the door. He rebuked the girl for her folly, and assured her that her mistress was in Abraham's bosom; but on looking out of the window, the well-known voice exclaimed, "For pity's sake, open the door. Do you forget that I have just been confined, and that cold in my condition would be fatal?" This was not the doubt which troubled his mind, nor was it the first observation we should have expected a wife to address to her husband, when, newly released from her grave by an almost miraculous deliverance, she suddenly appeared before him in the dead of night wearing the habiliments of the tomb. But as the husband was satisfied, it is not for us to be critical. Numerous places are declared to have been the scene of the incident of the ring, which M. Fontenelle considers to be cumulative testimony to its truth. We should have thought, on the contrary, that his faith would have been diminished as the stories increased. Marvels rarely go in flocks. In the present instance, few need to be told that M. Fontenelle has been drawing upon the standard literature of the nursery-that the ring-story is one of those with which children, from time immemorial, have been terrified and amused. "The nurse's legends are for truth received," and to the inventions which entertained their infancy, many are indebted for their after apprehensions lest the fate at which they shuddered in another should prove prophetic of their own. M. Fontenelle has himself thought that it would help out his subject to insert the poem of a M. Lesguillon, in which he relates from imagination the burial and resurrection of a lady who was set free, at the crisis of her despair, by the accident of a sexton cleaving her coffin with As a set-off to the miserable mortals who lost their lives through a seeming death, this very appearance is affirmed to have been the means of averting the reality. Tallemant has a story of a Baroness de Panat, who was choked by a fishbone, and duly buried for dead. Her servants, to get her jewels, disinterred her by night; and the lady's maid, who bore her a grudge, struck her in revenge several blows upon her neck. The malignity of the maid was the preservation of the mistress. Out flew the bone set free by the blows, and up rose the baroness to the discomfiture of her domestics. The retributive justice was complete, and the only objection to the narrative is that, like the fish-bone, it sticks in the throat. In this particular the stories mostly agree; a single anecdote comes recommended by intrinsic probability, and is no less distinguished from hearsay romances by the external authority; for it is told by the famous Sydenham, a man who was not more an honor to his profession by his skill than to his kind by his virtues. The faculty of his day demonstrated, on principles derived from abstract reasoning, that the small pox ought to yield to a hot regimen; and, though patients died, physicians thought death under a philosophical treatment, better than a capricious and perverse recovery in defiance of rules. Sydenham, who reformed the whole system of medicine by substituting experience for speculation, and who, besides indicating the right road, was himself perhaps the nicest observer of the habits of disease that ever lived, had early discovered that the antidote was to be found at the other end of the thermometer. The science which saved the lives of the public was the torment of his own. He was assailed by the profession to the close of his days for being wiser than his generation, and among the facts by which he mildly and modestly defended his practice, he relates with evident satisfaction how a young man, at Bristol, was stewed by his physician into a seeming death, and afterwards recovered by a mere exposure to cold. The moment he appeared to expire, his attendants laid him out, leaving nothing upon his body except a sheet thrown lightly over it. No sooner had he escaped from the domain of art to the dominion of nature than he began to revive, and lived to vindicate Sydenham, to shame his opponents, and to prove that there are occasions in which the remedy against death is to seem to be dead. The ancient who originated the celebrated saying, "The physician that heals is death," never anticipated such a verification of his maxim.

The three examples, however, which the resurrectionists consider their stronghold, yet remain to be told; and it must be confessed that many have lent them the weight of their authority who reject the mass of old wives' fables, though with the im

thrice buried, and by the grace of God thrice restored." The testimony seems striking; as he himself related his history to Misson the traveller, either Civile was a liar, say our authors, or the story is true. But without taking much from the romance of his adventures, the details are fatal to the value of the precedent. His first burial, to begin with, occurred before he was born. His mother died when she was advanced in pregnancy during her husband's absence, and nobody, before committing her body to the ground, thought of saving the child. His father's return prevented his going altogether out of the world before he had come into it-and here was concluded the first act of the death, burial, and restoration of François de Civile. His next death was at the siege of Rouen, in 1562, where he fell senseless, struck by a ball, and some workmen, who were digging a trench, immediately threw a little mould upon his body, which was burial the second. The servant of Civile tried to find out his remains, with the intention to bestow on them a formal interment. Returning from a fruitless search he caught sight of a stretched-out arm, which he knew to be his master's by a diamond ring that glittered on the hand, and the body, as he drew it forth, was visibly breathing. For some days life and death waged an equal contest, and when life was winning, a party of the enemy, the town having been taken, discovered him in bed, and threw him from the window. He fell on a dung-heap, where they left him to perish, which he considered was death and burial the third. Civile's case would never have been quoted on its own merits; the prominence given it is entirely due to the imposing description which a passion for notoriety made him write after his name, and which still continues to arrest the imagination. He survived to have a fourth funeral, and we hope when he was finally laid in the earth that he did not verify a proverb, much in vogue in his day, that a sailor often wrecked gets drowned at last.

More of our readers may recollect the story of the Spanish grandee, who was opened by the great anatomist, Vesalius, and his heart found beating, notwithstanding the havoc that had been made by the knife. The family of the nobleman, so runs the tale, complained to the Inquisition, and the Inquisition decided that in a physician with the skill of Vesalius such an error implied a crime. Philip II. employed his authority to procure a pardon, and with difficulty obtained that the sentence of death should be commuted into a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Hallam, whose epithets have almost a judicial authority, calls the accusation absurd, and absurd it may be proved on physiological grounds. But the whole story is an idle rumor written by somebody from Spain to Hubert Languet, after the death of Vesalius, to account for a journey which puzzled the public. Clusius, who was in Madrid