It is surprising to see for what foolish causes men hang themselves.  The most silly repulse, the most trifling ruffle of temper, or derangement of stomach, anything seems to justify an appeal to the razor or the cord.  I have a contempt for persons who destroy themselves.  Live on, and look evil in the face; walk up to it, and you will find it less than you imagined, and often you will not find it at all; for it will recede as you advance.  Any fool may be a suicide.  When you are in a melancholy fit, first suspect the body, appeal to rhubarb and calomel, and send for the apothecary; a little bit of gristle sticking in the wrong place, an untimely consumption of custard, excessive gooseberries, often cover the mind with clouds and bring on the most distressing views of human life.

I start up at two o’clock in the morning, after my first sleep, in an agony of terror, and feel all the weight of life upon my soul.  It is impossible that I can bring up such a family of children; my sons and daughters will be beggars!  I shall live to see those whom I love exposed to the scorn and contumely of the world!—­But stop, thou child of sorrow, and humble imitator of Job, and tell me on what you dined.  Was not there soup and salmon, and then a plate of beef, and then duck, blanc-mange, cream cheese, diluted with beer, claret, champagne, hock, tea, coffee, and noyeau?  And after all this you talk of the mind and the evils of life!  These kinds of cases do not need meditation, but magnesia.  Take short views of life.  What am I to do in these times with such a family of children?  So I argued, and lived dejected and with little hope; but the difficulty vanished as life went on.  An uncle died, and left me some money; an aunt died, and left me more; my daughter married well; I had two or three appointments, and before life was half over became a prosperous man.  And so will you.  Every one has uncles and aunts who are mortal; friends start up out of the earth; time brings a thousand chances in your favour; legacies fall from the clouds.  Nothing so absurd as to sit down and wring your hands because all the good which may happen to you in twenty years has not taken place at this precise moment.

The greatest happiness which can happen to any one is to cultivate a love of reading.  Study is often dull because it is improperly managed.  I make no apology for speaking of myself, for as I write anonymously nobody knows who I am, and if I did not, very few would be the wiser—­but every man speaks more firmly when he speaks from his own experience.  I read four books at a time; some classical book perhaps on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.  The “History of France,” we will say, on the evenings of the same days.  On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, Mosheim, or Lardner, and in the evening of those days, Reynolds’s Lectures or Burns’s Travels.  Then I have always a standing book of poetry, and a novel to read when I am in the humour to read nothing else.  Then I translate some French into English one day, and re-translate it the next; so that I have seven or eight pursuits going on at the same time, and this produces the cheerfulness of diversity, and avoids that gloom which proceeds from hanging a long while over a single book.  I do not recommend this as a receipt for becoming a learned man, but for becoming a cheerful one.