To be overpowered with languor must make a man very unhappy. He is tantalized with a thousand ineffectual wishes which he cannot realise. For as Tantalus is fabled to have been tormented by the objects of his desire being ever in his near view, yet ever receding from his touch as he endeavoured to approach them, the languid Hypochondriack has the sad mystification of being disappointed of realising every wish, by the wretched defect of his own activity. While in that situation time passes over him only to be loaded with regrets. The important duties of life, the benevolent offices of friendship are neglected, though he is sensible that he shall upbraid himself for that neglect till he is glad to take shelter under cover of disease. In this account there is no ill-placed levity and no extravagance such as we might fear to find. It is a simple and effective account of an unpleasant experience. The advice which he gives to hypochondriacs from time to time is similarly grave and sympathetic, and concerned with defeating the dangers of their state of mind; his view is that the disease is nearly always curable; he unwillingly admits that there are cases beyond hope, and condemns pessimistic fatalism: We should guard against imagining that there is a volcano within us, a melancholy so dreadful that we can do nothing in opposition to it. It would be a mistake to suppose when we read such grave advice that Boswell had a serious view of himself as the spiritual adviser of hypochondriacs. His object, as he tells us, was to divert them; and in that frame of mind no doubt he began to write. He became grave and even earnest because he had a very strong vein of seriousness. In the ordinary way of life he was light-hearted enough, and easily dispensed with his thoughts when they began to be uncomfortable: but when he had set himself to write from a text he persevered with his serious reflections and they found expression. He was able to reach considerable heights; a famous epitaph, when he is writing upon a motto from Cicero about the duties of Conscience, stirs him to a noble feeling: The epitaph upon Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's Church, of which he was the architect, has been justly admired as sublime: 'Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice'; 'Reader, if you would see his monument, cast your eyes around you,' so that the whole Church is made his Mausoleum. In my opinion there is a similar sublimity about this sentiment, by which a man, upon the ancient principle of [Greek: tima seauton], 'reverence thyself,' is taught to expand his mind into a grand theatre of self-observation.