Perhaps, on the other hand, the melancholy one lives too much in the country.  Then let him go to Paris or Vienna; let him try the Palais Royal, and spend a good deal of money in the shops.  A course of this might have cured even Obermann, whom there was nothing to check or divert while he kept philandering on the mountains with the snows and his woes.  There are plenty of such cures for a melancholy not yet incurable; change of air, scene, food, amusement, and occupation being the best.  True, the Romans tried this, as Seneca and Lucretius tells us, and found themselves as much bored as ever.  “No easier nor no quicker passed th’ impracticable hours.”  But the Romans were very extreme cases.

When the cause of melancholy is religious or moral, there is little to be done with the victim.  In “Sartor Resartus” he will read how Mr. Carlyle cured himself, if ever he was cured.  To be brief, he said, “What then, who cares?” and indeed, in more reverent form of expression, it is all that can be said.  When Nicias addressed the doomed and wasted remnant of the Athenian expedition to Syracuse, he told them that “others, too, being men, had borne things which had to be endured.”  That is the whole philosophy of the matter.

THACKERAY’S LONDON.

A house in a highly respectable square, where Jeames Yellowplush was in service, had recently the fame of being haunted.  No one knew exactly what haunted this desirable mansion, or how, though a novelist was understood to have supplied a satisfactory legend.  The young man who “investigated” the ghost rang the bell thrice violently, and then fell down dead, nor could he in any wise satisfy the curiosity of his friends.  That fable is exploded.  It was what is called an “aetiological myth;” by the learned it was merely a story devised to account for the fact that the house was not occupied.  The imagination of man, confronted by so strange a problem as money running to waste, took refuge in the supernatural.  Much more truly haunted than the house in “Buckley Square” are the streets of London which are tenanted by the ghosts that genius created.  These, having never been born, can never die, and still we may meet them in the roads and squares where they lived and took their pastime.  Mr. Rideing, an American author, has published (with Messrs. Jarvis and Son) a little volume called “Thackeray’s London,” an account of the places which that great novelist made household words, and filled with genial spectres that time can never lay.  Mr. Rideing’s little book does not strike us as being quite complete.  Surely Thackeray, especially in the “Ballads,” mentions many places not alluded to by the new topographer.  Besides, Mr. Rideing says that Thackeray’s readers forget the localities in which his characters appear.  Surely this is a calumny on human memory.  Who but thinks of Becky Sharp as he trudges down Curzon Street?  Has Bryanston Square properly any reason