"My dear lady," said he, "yours is a case in which physicians can be of very little use. There is something on the mind which my prescriptions fail to reach; worry of some sort—decidedly worry. And unless you yourself can either cure that, or will make head against it, worry, my dear Lady Montfort, will end, not in consumption—you are too finely formed to let worry eat holes in the lungs—no; but in a confirmed aneurism of the heart, and the first sudden shock might then be immediately fatal. The heart is a noble organ—bears a great deal—but still its endurance has limits. Heart complaints are more common than they were;—over-education and over-civilization, I suspect. Very young people are not so subject to them; they have flurry, not worry—a very different thing. A good chronic silent grief of some years' standing, that gets worried into acute inflammation at the age when feeling is no longer fancy, throws out a heart-disease which sometimes kills without warning, or sometimes, if the grief be removed, will rather prolong than shorten life, by inducing a prudent avoidance of worry in future. There is that worthy old gentleman who was taken so ill at Fawley, and about whom you were so anxious; in his case there had certainly been chronic grief; then came acute worry, and the heart could not get through its duties. Fifty years ago doctors would have cried 'apoplexy!'—nowadays we know that the heart saves the head. Well, he was more easy in his mind the last time I saw him, and, thanks to his temperance, and his constitutional dislike to self-indulgence in worry, he may jog on to eighty, in spite of the stethoscope! Excess in the moral emotions gives heart-disease; abuse of the physical powers, paralysis;—both more common than they were—the first for your gentle sex, the second for our rough one. Both, too, lie in wait for their victims at the entrance into middle life. I have a very fine case of paralysis now; a man built up by nature to live to a hundred—never saw such a splendid formation—such bone and such muscle. I would have given Van Amburgh the two best of his lions, and my man would have done for all three in five minutes. All the worse for him, my dear lady—all the worse for him. His strength leads him on to abuse the main fountains of life, and out jumps avenging Paralysis and fells him to earth with a blow. Tis your Hercules that Paralysis loves; she despises the weak invalid, who prudently shuns all excess. And so, my dear lady, that assassin called Aneurism lies in wait for the hearts that abuse their own force of emotion; sparing hearts that, less vital, are thrifty in waste and supply. But you are not listening to me! And yet
