through multitudes of the great, the elegant, and the gay, in painful stupor, scarcely recognizing the features of my friends, and fearful of being noticed by those who knew me. The charms of wit, and the splendors of youthful beauty, were to me as unalluring as age and ugliness, when joined to the deformities of vice, and the fatiguing prate of senseless folly. During this miserable impotence of soul, and while I vainly sought a temporary relief of my own calamity, I was hourly assailed by a crowd of wretched souls, who implored me to afford them my professional aid, to alleviate those pains which time, alas! had fixed in their constitutions and which depended more on the management and reformation of their own minds, than on the powers of medicine to cure. For-- I could not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And, with a sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighed upon the heart. To avoid these painful importunities, I flew from the tasteless scenes with abrupt and angry violence; and confining myself to the solitude of my apartments, passed the lingering day in dreary dejection, musing on the melancholy group from which I had just escaped. But my home did not long afford me an asylum. I was on the ensuing day assailed by a host of hypochondriacs, attended by their respective advisers, who, while my own nervous malady was raging at its full height, stunned me with the various details of their imaginary woes, and excruciated me the whole day with their unfounded ails and tormenting lamentations. The friendly approach of night at length relieved me from their importunities; but my spirits had been exhausted, my feelings so vexed, my patience so tried, and the sensibilities of my mind so aggravated, by the persecution I had endured, that-- “Tir’d nature’s sweet restorer, balmly sleep,”