He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so well perform that office for him.  He cares for few spectators to his tragedy.  Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths, and his cordials.  He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post.

To the world’s business he is dead.  He understands not what the callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call:  and even in the lines of that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of himself as the sick man.  To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully for fear of rustling—­is no speculation which he can at present entertain.  He thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow.

Household rumours touch him not.  Some faint murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is.  He is not to know any thing, not to think of any thing.  Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands.  Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him:  he can just endure the pressure of conjecture.  He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking “who was it?” He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer.  In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.  Compare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served—­with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little better—­and you will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition.

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family’s eye?  The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies—­how is it reduced to a common bedroom!  The trimness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about it.  It is made every day.  How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when