Many expedients have indeed been suggested for laying this busy principle asleep, and many plans struck out for rendering its pangs supportable; but hitherto without success. For though it has been proposed to laugh it away, dance it away, drink it away, or travel it away; yet not one of these projects has answered the end: and Fashionable casuists are as far as ever from finding out a remedy of sufficient potency, to cure, or even abate, in any material degree, the pains of Reflection. And here I cannot but remark, how grievously the seat of this disease (for such it is considered) has been mistaken by those who have so lightly undertaken to prescribe for its removal. They have manifestly considered it as a disorder of the _nerves_; and hence all the remedies which they have recommended, are calculated to promote, either by change of scene, or by some other mechanical impulse, a brisker circulation of the animal spirits. The ill success with which each has been attended, sufficiently proclaims the fallacy upon which they all are founded. If Reflection had been only a nervous disturbance, if it had arisen out of any disarrangement of the _animal_ economy, some, at least, of the Fashionable nostrums would have dispersed the complaint: whereas it is notorious, that, under every regimen which has been tried, while the stronger symptoms have disappeared, the disorder has remained in the system; and neither Bath, nor Weymouth, nor Tunbridge, nor Town, has ever effected a cure. The plain truth is, (whatever may be insinuated to the contrary by these _Médecins à-la-mode_,) that the disease is altogether _moral_; and, consequently, the seat of it is not in the nerves, but in the _Conscience_. There is, in fact, nothing new in the complaint: it is inseparably connected with a Fashionable career; and has been more or less the scourge of all, in every age, who have declined the duties which they owe “to God and their inferiors.” I take it to have been a malady of the very same description which afflicted Herod in his communication with the Baptist, and which made Felix tremble under the reasoning of Paul. It is not a little remarkable, that both these men of Fashion (for such no doubt they were) fell into the error which has been condemned, in the treatment of their disease; and each, there is reason to believe, carried it with him to his grave.