“I never went into the street but I thought the people stood and laughed at me, and held me in contempt; and could hardly persuade myself but that the voice of conscience was loud enough for any one to hear it. They who knew me, appeared to avoid me, and if they spoke to me, seemed to do it in scorn. I bought a ballad of one who was singing it in the street, because I thought it was written on me. I dined alone, either at a tavern, where I went in the dark, or at the chop-house, where I always took care to hide myself in the darkest corner of the room. I slept generally an hour in the evening, but it was only to be terrified in dreams; and when I awoke, it was some time before I could steadily walk through the passage into the dining-room. I reeled and staggered like a drunken man. The eyes of man I did not fear; but when I thought that the eyes of God were upon me, (which I felt assured of,) it gave me the most intolerable anguish. If, for a moment, a book or a companion stole away my attention from myself, a flash from hell seemed to be thrown into my mind immediately; and I said within myself, ‘What are these things to me, who am damned?’” Cowper is not the only instance, however, of a man of exquisite taste and genius whose life has been rendered miserable by hypochondria. We have alluded elsewhere to Byron’s morbid sensitiveness, and the reader’s attention is now called to the influence of hypochondriasis on the poet’s mind. He says in his journal, “What can be the reason I awake every morning in actual despair and despondency?” He had a great apprehension of insanity. In order to overcome his melancholy, considering that his diet had much to do with it, he put himself under a strict regimen, avoiding most scrupulously all animal food. He states that his diet for a week consisted of tea and six dry biscuits per diem. After having indulged in an ordinary dinner, he writes, “I wish to God I had not dined now; it kills me with heaviness; and yet it was but a pint of bucellas, and fish. Oh, my head! how it aches!—the horrors of indigestion!” Again he says, “This head was given me to ache with.” After a severe fit of indigestion, he writes, “I’ve no more charity than a vinegar cruet. Would that I were an ostrich, and dieted on fire-irons! O fool! I shall go mad!”