But—_pace_ the doctors and all their materialistic followers—I question very much whether bodily health, the mere absence of physical disease, be nearly as indispensable a condition of happiness as certain peculiarities of the mental and moral constitution. The disposition to Anxiety, for instance, which reduces many lives to a purgatory of incessant care,—about money, about the opinion of society, or about the health and well-being of children,—is certainly a worse drawback to peace and happiness than half the diseases in the Registrar-General’s list. This anxious temperament is commonly supposed to be fostered and excited in towns, and laid to sleep in the peaceful life of the country; and, if it were certainly and invariably so, I think the balance of happiness between the two would well-nigh be settled by that fact alone. But again there is something to be said on the side of the town. An African traveller has described to me how, after months exposed to the interminable perils from man and brute and climate, he felt, after his first night on board a homeward-bound English ship, a reaction from the tension of anxiety which revealed to himself the anguish he had been half-unconsciously enduring for many months. In like manner the city man or the statesman feels, when at last he takes his summer holiday, under what tremendous pressure of care he has been living during the past year, or session, in London; and he compares it, naturally enough, with the comparatively careless life of his friend, the country squire. But every one in London does not run a race for political victory or social success, and there are yet some sober old ways of business—both legal and mercantile—which do not involve the alternative of wealth or ruin every hour. For such people I apprehend London life is actually rather a cure for an anxious temperament than a provocative of care. There is no time for dwelling on topics of a painful sort, or raising spectres of possible evils ahead. Labors and pleasures, amusements and monetary worries, succeed each other so rapidly that the more serious anxieties receive less and less attention as the plot of London life thickens year by year. One nail drives out another, and we are now and then startled to remember that there has been really for days and months a reasonable fear of disaster hanging over us to which we have somehow scarcely given a thought, while in the country it would have filled our whole horizon, and we should scarcely have forgotten it day or night.