De Quincey himself, with all his power of eloquence and word-painting, might have found even the dreams of an opium-eater less difficult to fix and to describe than the marvellous fancies and dissolving views of hypochondria, when it passes from the domain of fancy into that of real illness. In that earlier and fanciful stage it may or may not be conquerable by that effort of the will which is so easy to preach and so hard to practise; but in the second it is, save by the action of what I suppose I must call--in days when a higher and a nobler Name is something out of date in the 'best circles'--the _vis medicatrix 'Naturæ,'_ practically incurable. The doctors, who know what Galen knew and no more, but apparently believe in themselves none the less even for the teaching of Molière, are powerless before it. Their kindness of heart abounds--as, thank God, there is much of it everywhere--but their skill does not keep pace with it. One of the kindest of them whom I know, and I think the most sensible, told me that he had once under his care a lady who was suffering from hypochondria in a severe form. She recovered; and some time afterwards she met with an injury to the spine, of which she died in great pain. When she was dying she told him that her sufferings were as nothing to what she remembered of the mental pain of that first illness. And I believe it to the full; though we know that mercifully there is nothing we forget so soon as pain. Add to that indefinable and wearing agony the surroundings of a large lunatic asylum--beyond conception the most cruel place for such a malady--with medical supervision merely nominal, where all, with scarcely an exception, are regarded as incurably mad, and simply kept out of the way to save families trouble,--and the pen of a De Quincey would help me as little in the description as my own. I shall, therefore, begin quietly from the beginning.