SIR THOMAS BROWN. It is very surprising, and rather amusing, to invalids whose constitution and disease dispose them to other kinds of ill-temper rather than irritability, to perceive how this tendency, and no other, is set up as a test of temper by persons inexperienced in sickness. There are cases, and they are not few, where an invalid’s freedom from irritability of temper is a merit of a very high order indeed: but there are many,--perhaps more,--where, to award praise on this ground, is like extolling the sick person for being worthy of trust with untold gold, or for his being never known to game or get drunk. This last, indeed, may,--amidst the sinkings of illness, with wine and laudanum in the closet,--often be actually the greater merit. It is a case in which every thing depends on the existence of temptation. Persons suffering under frequent fever, or certain kinds of pain or nervous disturbance, or afflicted with ill-qualified nurses, may be pardoned for almost any degree of irritability, or may be unspeakably meritorious in resisting the tendency, with more or less steadiness. But there are some of us who cannot but smile at compliments on our freedom from irritability, when we feel that we never have the slightest inclination to be cross, nor have the least excuse for being so,--while we may be most abasingly aware of other kinds of frailty of temper. To me it appears that we are, for the most part, in greater peril from other faults, because they are less looked for, less discussed and recognised, and we are, therefore, less put upon our guard against them: and also because their consequences are less immediately and obviously detrimental to our own comfort. Besides that all persons grow up on the look-out for irritability of temper, and therefore are more or less on the watch against it when they come to be ill, it is clear to the idlest and most selfish mind, that the whole hope of comfort in the sick-room depends on the freedom and cheerfulness of the intercourse held in it,--a freedom and cheerfulness forfeited by irritability on the part of the sufferer,--necessarily forfeited, even if he were tended by the hands of angels. Children are the brightest, if not the tenderest, angels of the sick-room; and the alternative between their coming springing in, not only voluntarily but eagerly, and their being brought, for observance’ sake, with force and fear, is of itself inducement enough to self-control on the part of the most fretted patient, in the most feverish hour. Even in the middle of the night, when no one is by but the soundly sleeping nurse, the invalid feels admonished to suppress the slightest moan, when he sees in fancy his little friends the next morning either leaping from their beds at the joyful thought that they may visit him, or asking, with awe and gravity, whether they must go, and how soon they may come away. It is the sweetest of cordials to the