London is full now; elsewhere country folks come out of doors, invited by fine weather. Walk where you will, in country or in town, and look at all the faces that you meet. Traverse the Strand, and Regent-street, and Holborn, and Cheapside; get into a boat at London bridge, steam to Gravesend, and look at your fellow-passengers: examine where you will, the stamp of our civilization, sickliness, is upon nine people in any ten. There are good reasons why this should be so, and so let it continue. We have excluded sanitary calculations from our social life; we have had hitherto unhealthy homes, and we will keep them. Bede tells of a Mercian noble on his death-bed, to whom a ghost exhibited a scrap of paper, upon which were written his good deeds; then the door opened, and an interminable file of ghosts brought in a mile or two of scroll, whereon his misdeeds were all registered, and made him read them. Our wars against brute health are glorious, and we rejoice to feel that of such sins we have no scanty catalogue; we are content with our few items of mere sanitary virtue. As for sanitary reformers, they are a company of Danaids; they may get some of us into their sieve, but we shall soon slip out again. When a traveler proposed, at Ghadames in the Sahara, to put up a lantern here and there of nights among the pitch-dark streets, the people said his notion might be good, but that, as such things never had been tried before, it would be presumptuous to make the trial of them now. The traveler, a Briton, must have felt quite at home when he heard that objection. Amen, then; with the Ghadamese, we say, Let us have no New Lights. VI. Art Against Appetite. The object of food is, to support the body in its natural development that it may reach a reasonable age without becoming too robust. Civilization can instruct us so to manage, that a gentle dissolution tread upon the heels of growth, that, as Metastasio hath it, —“dalle fasce, Si comincia a morir quando si nasce.”(2) An infant’s appetite is all for milk; but art suggests a few additions to that lamentably simple diet. A lady not long since complacently informed her medical attendant that, for the use of a baby, then about eight months old she had spent nine pounds in “Infant’s Preservative.” Of this, or of some like preparation, the advertisements tells us that it compels Nature to be orderly, and that all infants take it with greediness. So we have even justice to the child. Pet drinks Preservative; papa drinks Port.