not what he has been told he ought to like.  He has been so long removed from public opinion, that, like a shipwrecked crew in an open boat, it has ceased to affect him; only, instead of taking to cannibalism, he takes to what is nice.  As his physical appetite is fastidious, so his mental palate has a relish only for titbits.  If ever there was a time for a reasonable being to ‘dip’ into books, or to enjoy ’half-hours with the best authors,’ this is it; but weak as the patient is, he commonly declines to have his tastes dictated to; perhaps there is an unpleasant association in his mind, arising from Brand and Liebig, with all ‘extracts;’ but, at all events, those literary compilations oppress and bewilder him; he objects to the extraordinary fertility of ‘Ibid,’ an author whose identity he cannot quite call to mind, and prefers to choose for himself.

Biography is out of the question.  Long before he has got through that account of the hero’s great grandmother, from whom he inherited his talents, which is, it seems, indispensable to such works, he yawns, and devoutly wishing, notwithstanding its fatal consequences to the fourth generation, that that old woman had never been born, falls into fitful slumber.

Travels are in the same condemnation; he has not the patience to watch the traveller taking leave of his family at Pimlico, or to follow his cab as he drives through the streets to the railway station, or to share the discomforts of his cabin—­all necessary, no doubt, to his eventual arrival in Abyssinia, but hardly necessary to be described.  Moreover, the convalescent has probably travelled a good deal on his own account during the last few weeks, for the bed of fever carries one hither and thither with the velocity, though not the ease, of the enchanted carpet in the ‘Arabian Nights.’  The desire of the sick man is to escape from himself and all recent experiences.

He thinks he will try a little History.  Alison?  No, certainly not Alison.  ‘They will be proposing Lingard next,’ he murmurs, and the little irritation caused by the well-meant suggestion throws him back for the next six hours.  Presently he tries Macaulay, whom some flatterer has fulsomely called ‘as good as a novel,’ but, though the trial of Warren Hastings gives him a fillip, the rout of Sedgemoor does away with the effect of it, and, happening upon the character of Halifax, he suffers a severe relapse.  As a bedfellow, Macaulay is too declamatory, though, at the same time, strange to say, he does not always succeed in keeping one awake.  To the sick man Carlyle is preferable; not his ‘Frederick,’ of course, and still less his ’Sartor Resartus,’ which has become a nightmare, without head or tail, but his ‘French Revolution.’  One lies and watches the amazing spectacle without effort, as though it were represented on the stage.  The sea of blood rolls before our eyes, the roar of the mob sounds in our ears; we are carried along with the unhappy Louis to the very frontier, and just on the verge of escape are seized and brought back—­King Coach—­with him to Paris, in a cold perspiration.