One of the observations which these volumes force upon us, is the agreeable evidence of the improvement in the public health. Every man in high station seems to have been the victim of a perpetual tendency to disease. Ministers seem universally to have been tortured by gout, or some painful disorder, which drove them to the country, the Continent, or the Bath waters. The women of rank had some unaccountable and indescribable malady of their own, which they called the Vapours; every judge had some excruciating disorder, which he could alleviate only by opium; every man of letters had some ailment of the same kind. The common people, living in the unventilated and obscure haunts of cities, had, of course, all the diseases which we are now so slowly striving to prevent; and the ploughman appeared to enjoy the only health in the land. How far the improvement in this all-important matter may be owing to improved medical science, to the drainage of the soil, to more extended agriculture, or to some fortunate change in the atmosphere, or even to the adoption of more temperate habits, and the substitution of lighter food, we cannot precisely say; but there can be scarcely a doubt of the change in the general state of health, in the duration of life, in the proportion of those who grow up to maturity to those who die in infancy, and even in the continued vigour of the frame and faculties to a more advanced age. The first letter in the correspondence is from Lord Cornbury, recommending Mr Grenville to travel for his recovery from a sickness which apparently enfeebled all his earlier years. His lordship suggests the south of France as a supplement to Bath, where he had gone to drink the waters, then a _panacea_ for the distempers of high life, and where his residence is mentioned in a lively epistle from Lyttleton to Pope. "George Grenville is in a fair way of recovery; the waters agree with him. Cheyne (the physician) says he is a giant, a son of Anak, made like Gilbert, the Lord Bishop of Sarum, and may, therefore, if he pleases, _live for ever_; his present sickness being nothing but a fillip given for his good, to make him temperate, and put him under the care of Dr Cheyne." Lord Cornbury was an amiable young man, given to hospitality and letter-writing, and panegyrised by Pope in such tributes as his pretended scorn for nobility did not prevent him from paying to his entertainers:-- "Would you be blest, despise low joys, low gains, Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains; Be virtuous, and be happy, for your pains."