spleen[411],” is trying upon the Irish both Hume’s problem of national character and the use of the medical figure. And, to take a modern instance, Lord Beaconsfield used the same figure of the old humoral pathology, and gave his adhesion to a theory of national characters adverse to the sense of Hume, when he ascribed the habits and manners of the Irish, and the course of their national history, to their propinquity to a “melancholy” ocean. As far back as we can go in the history, two diseases are conspicuous--the flux or “the country disease,” and the sharp fever or “Irish ague.” When Henry II. invaded Ireland in 1172, his army suffered from flux, which the contemporary chronicler, Radulphus de Diceto, dean of St Paul’s, set down to the unwonted eating of fresh meat (_recentium esus carnium_), the drinking of water, and the want of bread[412]. Less than a generation after, Giraldus of Wales wrote his “Topography of Ireland,” wherein he remarks that hardly any stranger, on his first coming to the country, escapes the flux by reason of the juicy food (_ob humida nutrimenta_)[413]. At that time Ireland was almost wholly a pastoral country, and a pastoral country it has remained to a far greater extent than England or Scotland. It is to this comparative want of tillage, an almost absolute want when Giraldus was there, that we shall probably have to look in the last resort for an explanation of the two national maladies that here concern us--the “country disease” and the “Irish ague.” The same dietetic reason that the dean of St Paul’s gave in 1172 for the prevalence of flux in the army of Henry II., the want of bread and the eating of fresh meat, can be assigned for the country disease long after, and, in some periods, on the explicit testimony of observers. As to the Irish ague, or typhus fever, Giraldus mentions it in the medieval period; and Higden, copying him exactly, says: “The inhabitants of Ireland are vexed by no kind of fever except the acute, and that seldom”--the word _acuta_ being the original of “the ague,” or, as in another translation of the passage, “the sharp axes[414].” In this pastoral country, according to Giraldus, there was little sickness and little need of physicians; but there is hardly an instance of military operations by the English unattended with sickness among the troops, and famine with sickness among the native Irish.