An intelligent Italian gentleman, interested in the case of an English friend suffering from nervous prostration, once endeavoured to console him by saying that, in his opinion, it was only clever people who suffered from nerves. Stupid people had the same things the matter with them, he said, but they were too stupid to find it out. An original notion, certainly. Unhappily, however true it may be that we lack the wits to diagnose our ills, I know of many persons belonging to the labouring classes who could scarcely be considered clever even by their best friends, yet who are not only afflicted with the universal malady, but are painfully conscious of the fact. Indeed, no rank or occupation secures immunity from the visitations of our modern foe. In these days of ready communication and rapid rise and fall of families, influences affecting one part of the community quickly affect the whole. True, certain conditions may be more fatal to fine organisations--to the noblest and the best, to the most useful and the most intelligent--than to the ill-developed; but of this more hereafter. When I see people dropping out of the ranks one after another, each probably having been confident that to him, at any rate, the disease would never come, I am reminded of De Quincey’s “Klosterheim,” where citizen after citizen was stolen away by the unseen foe. We understand so little of the causes of these break-downs, that we will not be warned in time; our partial but growing weakness is so gradual, that we become accustomed to it, and think that nothing worse will befall us; and yet the final collapse is often so sudden, that it at last comes upon us unawares, and our total prostration is a surprise to ourselves. Perhaps some shock or accident is blamed for the disaster, the long period of weakness preceding it being ignored; or we fall a victim to some well-known illness, and regard it as the judgment of Heaven, which we were powerless to avoid, instead of telling ourselves that we might have avoided it, and ought to have avoided it, by acting wisely in the first instance, and fortifying ourselves against its inroads. CHAPTER III. _INEFFECTUAL TREATMENT._