The conclusion of the whole matter is this: Set apart some provision to make merry with _at home_, and guard that reserve as religiously as the priests guarded the shew-bread in the temple. However great you are, however good, however wide the general interests that you may control, you gain nothing by neglecting home-duties. You must leave enough of yourself to be able to bear and forbear, give and forgive, and be a source of life and cheerfulness around the hearthstone. The great sign given by the Prophets of the coming of the Millennium is,--what do you suppose?--“He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” Thus much on avoiding unhealthy, irritable states. But it still remains that a large number of people will be subject to them unavoidably for these reasons. _First._ The use of tobacco, alcohol, and other kindred stimulants, for so many generations, has vitiated the brain and nervous system of modern civilized races so that it is not what it was in former times. Michelet treats of this subject quite at large in some of his late works; and we have to face the fact of a generation born with an impaired nervous organization, who will need constant care and wisdom to avoid unhealthy, morbid irritation. There is a temperament called the HYPOCHONDRIAC, to which many persons, some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are born heirs,--a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent depression,--an unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though accompanied often with the greatest talents. Sometimes, too, it is the unfortunate lot of those who have not talents, who bear its burdens and its anguish without its rewards. People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and despondency, of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the aspect of the whole world to them, which present lying reports of their friends, of themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and of all with which they have to do. Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to _understand themselves_ and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache, to know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill the mind with wretched illusions, to make them seem miserable and unlovely to themselves, to make their nearest friends seem unjust and unkind, to make all events appear to be going wrong and tending to destruction and ruin.