Some people, when in health and of a sane mind (Mr. Matthew Arnold one knows of, and there may be others), take great delight in ’Paradise Regained;’ all we venture to say is that in sickness it does not suggest its title.  It is said that barley-water goes well with everything; if so, the epic is the exception which proves the rule.  Milton is tedious after rheumatic fever, Spencer is worse.

    ’"Not from the grand old masters,
       Not from the bards sublime,
    Whose distant footsteps echo
       Through the corridors of Time,"’

murmurs the invalid, ‘I can’t stand them.’  He does not mean anything depreciatory, but merely that—­

    ’Like strains of martial music
       Their mighty thoughts suggest
    Life’s endless toil and endeavour,’

which he is not fit even to think of.  He cannot read Keats’s ‘Nightingale,’ but for quite another reason.  What arouses ’thoughts too deep for tears’ in the hale and strong is to the sick as the sinking for an artesian well.  ‘The Chelsea Waterworks,’ as Mr. Samuel Weller observed of Mr. Job Trotter (at a time when the metropolitan water supply would seem to have been more satisfactory than at present), ’are nothing to him.’  On the other hand, Shelley’s ‘Skylark,’ and the ‘Dramatic Fragments’ of Browning, are as cordials to the invalid, while the poems of Walter Scott are like breezes from the mountains and the sea.  In that admirable essay, ‘Life in the Sick-room,’ the authoress justly remarks, speaking of the advantage of objectivity in sick books, ’Nothing can be better in this view than Macaulay’s “Lays,” which carry us at full speed out of ourselves.’

But it is not always that the invalid can read the poets at all; like Mrs. Wititterley, his nerves are too delicately strung for the touch of the muse.  His chief enjoyment lies in fiction, to the producers of which he can never feel too grateful.  I remember, on one occasion when I was very reduced indeed, taking up ‘Northanger Abbey,’ and reading, with almost the same gusto as though I had been a novelist myself, Miss Austen’s defence of her profession.  She says: 

’I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding, joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely even permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally takes up a novel, is sure to turn from its insipid pages with disgust.  Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.  Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.  From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth