And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it?  To become insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse?

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed.  How the patient lords it there! what caprices he acts without controul! how kinglike he sways his pillow—­tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.

He changes sides oftener than a politician.  Now he lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation.  Within the four curtains he is absolute.  They are his Mare Clausum.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! he is his own exclusive object.  Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.  ’Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him.  He has nothing to think of but how to get well.  What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.

A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a law-suit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend.  He was to be seen trudging about upon this man’s errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor.  The cause was to come on yesterday.  He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question to be tried at Pekin.  Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him understand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday, and his friend is ruined.  But the word “friend,” and the word “ruin,” disturb him no more than so much jargon.  He is not to think of any thing but how to get better.

What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing consideration!

He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only.

He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself.

He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying little stratagems and artificial alleviations.

He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members.  Sometimes he meditates—­as of a thing apart from him—­upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very scull, as it seemed, to take it thence.  Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers.  He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart.