There are few instances of the great change which has passed over the spirit of the modern world more striking than the revolution which has taken place in our judgment respecting the moral expediency of perpetually thinking about Death. Was it that the whole Classic world was so intensely entrancing and delightful that, to wean themselves from its fascinations and reduce their minds to composure, the Saints found it beneficial to live continually with a skull at their side? For something like sixteen centuries Christian teachers seem all to have taken it for granted that merely to write up “Memento mori” was to give to mankind the most salutary and edifying counsel. Has anybody faith in the same nostrum now, and is there a single Saint Francis or Saint Theresa who keeps his or her pet skull alongside of his Bible and Prayerbook? A parallel might also be drawn between the medical and spiritual treatment in vogue in former times and in our own. Up to our generation, when a man was ill, the first idea of the physician was to bleed him and reduce him in every way by “dephlogistic” treatment, after which it was supposed the disease was “drawn off”; and, if the patient expired, the survivors were consoled by the reflection that Dr. Sangrado had done all which science and skill could effect to preserve so valuable a life. In the memory of some now living, the presence of a medical man with a lancet in his pocket (instantly used on the emergency of a fall from horseback or a fit of apoplexy, epilepsy, or intoxication), was felt by alarmed relations to be quite providential. Only somewhere about the period of the first visitation of cholera in 1832 this phlebotomizing dropped out of fashion; and, when the doctors had pretty nearly abandoned it, a theory was broached that it was the human constitution, not medical science, which had undergone a change, and that men and women were so much weaker than heretofore that, even in fever, they now needed to be supported by stimulants. Very much in the same way it would appear that in former days our spiritual advisers imagined they could cure moral disease by reducing the vital action of all the faculties and passions, and bringing a man to feel himself a “dying creature” by way of training him to live. Nowadays our divines endeavor to fill us with warmer feelings and more vigorous will, and tell us that “’Tis life of which our veins are scant; O Life, not Death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, _that_ we want.” Is it possible that human nature is really a little less vigorous and passionate than it was when Antony and Cleopatra lived on the earth, or when the genius of Shakspere made them live on the stage? ESSAY V. TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW.