Mr. Lane seems to have been in a very bad way.  He gives an appalling account of the medical treatment under which he had suffered for nearly thirty years.  In spite of it all he found, at the age of forty-five, that his entire system was showing signs of breaking up.  He was suffering from neuralgia, which we believe means something like tic-douloureux extending over the whole body; he was threatened with paralysis, which had advanced so far as to have benumbed his right side; his memory was going; his mind was weakened; he was, in his own words, ‘no use to anybody:’  there were deep cracks round the edge of his tongue; his throat was ulcerated; in short, he was in a shocking state, and never likely to be better.  Like many people in such sad circumstances, lie had tried all other remedies before thinking of the Water Cure; he had resorted to galvanism, and so forth, but always got worse.  At length, on the 13th of May, 1845, Mr. Lane betook himself to Malvern, where Dr. Wilson presides over one of the largest cold-water establishments in the kingdom.  In those days there were some seventy patients in residence, but the new-comer was pleased to find that there was nothing repulsive in the appearance of any of his confreres,—­a consideration of material importance, inasmuch as the patients breakfast, dine, and sup together.  Nothing could have a more depressing effect upon any invalid, than to be constantly surrounded by a crowd of people manifestly dying, or afflicted with visible and disagreeable disease.  The fact is, judging from our own experience, that the people who go to the Water Cure are for the most part not suffering from real and tangible ailments, but from maladies of a comparatively fanciful kind,—­such as low spirits, shattered nerves, and lassitude, the result of overwork.  And our readers may be disposed to think, with ourselves, that the change of air and scene, the return to a simple and natural mode of life, and the breaking off from the cares and engagements of business, have quite as much to do with their restoration as the water-system, properly so called.

The situation of Malvern is well adapted to the successful use of the water system.  Sir E. B. Lytton tells us that ’the air of Malvern is in itself hygeian:  the water is immemorially celebrated for its purity:  the landscape is a perpetual pleasure to the eye.’  The neighbouring hills offer the exercise most suited to the cure:  Priessnitz said ‘One must have mountains:’  and Dr. Wilson told Mr. Lane, in answer to a remark that the Water Cure had failed at Bath and Cheltenham, that ’no good and difficult cures can be made in low or damp situations, by swampy grounds, or near the beds of rivers.’