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'Gape, sinner, and swallow."-Meg Merrilies.

It is now just a year since we reviewed Miss Martineau's "Life in the Sick Room," and left the authoress set in for a house-ridden invalid, alternating between her bed and the sofa; unable to walk out of doors, but enjoying through her window and a telescope the prospect of green downs and heath, an old priory, a lime-kiln, a colliery railway, an ancient church, a windmill, a farm, with hay and corn stacks, a market-garden, gossipping farmers, sportsmen, boys flying kites, washerwomen, a dairymaid feeding pigs, the lighthouses, harbor, and shipping of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and a large assortment of objects, pastoral, marine, and picturesque. There we left the "sick prisoner," as we supposed, quite aware of a condition beyond remedy, and cheerfully made up for her fate by the help of philosophy, laudanum, and Christian resignation.

There never was a greater mistake. Instead of the presumed calm submission in a hopeless case, the invalid was intently watching the progress of a new curative legerdemain, sympathizing with its repudiated professors, and secretly intending to try whether her own chronic complaint could not be conjured away with a “Hey, presto! pass and repass!" like a pea from under the thimble. The experiment, it seems, has been made, and lo! like one of the patients of the old quacksalvers, forth comes Miss Martineau on the public stage, proclaiming to the gaping crowd how her long-standing, inveterate complaint, that baffled all the doctors, has been charmed away like a wart, and that, from being a helpless cripple, she has thrown away her crutches, literal or

metaphorical, and can walk a mile as well as any Milesian. And this miraculous cure, not due to Holloway, Parr, Morison, or any of the rest of the faculty, not to any marvellous ointment, infallible pills, or new discovery in medicine, but solely to certain magical gesticulations, as safe, pleasant, and easy as playing at cat's cradle-in short by mesmerism!

Now we are, as we have said before, the greatest invalid in England; with a complication of complaints requiring quite a staff of physicians, each to watch and treat the particular disease which he has made his peculiar study: as, one for the heart, another for the lungs, a third for the stomach, a fourth for the liver, and so on. Above all, we are incapable of pedestrian locomotion; lamer than Crutched Friars, and, between gout in our ankles and rheumatism in our knees, could as easily walk on our head, like Quilp's boy, as on our legs. It would delight us, therefore, to believe that by no painful operation, but only a little posture-making behind our back or to our face, we could be restored to the use of our precious limbs, to walk like a leaguer, and run again like a renewed bill. But, alas! an anxious examination of Miss Martineau's statements has satisfied us that there is no chance of such a desirable consummation; that, to use a common phrase, "the news is too good to be true." We have carefully waded through the Newcastle letters, occupying some two dozen mortal columns of the "Athenæum," and with something of the mystified feeling of having been reading by turns and snatches in Moore's Almanac, Zadkiel's Astrology, a dream-book, and a treatise on metaphysics, have come to the sorrowful conclusion that we have as much chance of a cure by mesmerism, as of walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours through merely reading the constant advertisements of the Patent Pedometer. A conviction not at all removed by an actual encounter with a professor, who, after experimenting on the palms of our hands without exciting any peculiar sensation, except that quivering of the diaphragm which results from suppressed laughter, gravely informed us-slipping through a pleasant loophole of retreat from all difficulties-that "we were not in a fit state."

The precise nature of Miss Martineau's complaint is not stated; nor is it material to be known except to the professional man; the great fact, that after five years' confinement to the house she can walk as many miles without fatigue, thanks to the mysterious Ism, "that sadly wants a new name," is a sufficient subject for wonder, curiosity, and common sense, to discuss. A result obtained, it appears, after two months passed under the hands of three several persons—a performance that must be reckoned rather slow for a miracle, seeing that if we read certain passages aright, a mesmerizer," with a white hat and an illumi. nated profile, like a saint or an angel," is gifted with powers little, if at all, inferior to those of the old apostles. The delay, moreover, throws a doubt on the source of relief, for there are many diseases to which such an interval would allow of a natural remission.

In the curative process, the two most remarkable phenomena were-1st, That the patient, with a weasel-like vigilance, did not go as usual into the magnetic sleep or trance; and, 2dly, That every glorified object before her was invested with a peculiar light, so that a bust of Isis burnt with a phosphoric splendor, and a black, dirty, Newcastle steam-tug shone with heavenly radiance. Appearances, for which we at once take the lady's word, but must decline her inference, that they had any influence in setting her on her legs again. The nerves, and the optic ones especially, were, no doubt, in a highly excited state; but that a five-year-old lameness derived any relaxation from the effulgence we will believe, when the broken heart of a soldier's widow is bound up by a general illumination. Indeed, we remember once to have been personally visited with such lights, that we saw two candles instead of one-but we decidedly walked the worse for it.

On the subject of other visionary appearances Miss Martineau is less explicit, or rather tantalizingly obscure; for, after hinting that she has seen wonders above wonders, instead of favoring us with her revelations or mysteries, like Ainsworth or Eugene Sue, she plumply says that she means to keep them to herself.

"Between this condition and the mesmeric sleep there is a state, transient and rare, of which I have had experience, but of which I intend to give no

account. A somnambule calls it a glimmering of the lights of somnambulism and clairvoyance. To me there appears nothing like glimmering in it. The ideas that I have snatched from it, and now retain, are, of all ideas which ever visited me, the most lucid and impressive. It may be well that they are incommunicable-partly from their nature and relations, and partly from their unfitness for translation into mere words. I will only say that the condition is one of no nervous excitement,' as far as experience and outward indications can be taken as a test. Such a state of repose, of calm translucent intellectuality, I had never conceived of; and no reaction followed, no excitement but that which is natural to every one who finds himself in possession of a great new idea."

So that whether she obtained a glimpse of the New Jerusalem, or a peep into the World of Spirits, or saw the old gentleman himself, is left to wide conjecture. Our own guess, in the absence of all direction, is, that she enjoyed a mesmeric translation into another planet, and derived her great idea from the Man in the Moon!

This, however, is not the only suppression. For instance, it is said that one of the strongest powers of the girl J., the somnambulist, was the discernment of disease, its condition and remedies; that she cleared up her own case first, prescribing for herself very fluently, and then medically advised Miss Martineau, and that the treatment in both cases succeeded. Surely, in common charity to the afflicted, these infallible remedies ought to have been published; their nature ought to have been indicated, if only to enable one to judge of supernatural prescribing compared with professional practice; but so profound a silence is preserved on these points as to lead to the inevitable conclusion, that the mesmeric remedies, like the quack medicines, are to be secured by patent, and to be sold at so much a family bottle, stamp included. One recipe only transpires, of so common-place and popular a character, and so little requiring inspiration for its' invention—so ludicrously familiar to wide-awake advisers, that our sides shake to record how Miss Martineau, restless and sleepless for want of her abandoned opiates, was ordered ale at dinner, and brandy and water for a nightcap. Oh J. J.! well does thy initial stand also for Joker!

In addition to these suppressions, one unaccountable omission has certainly staggered us, as much as if we had considered it

through a couple of bottles of wine. In commcn with ourselves, our clever friend T. L., and many other persons-who all hear the music of the spheres, dumb bells, and other mute melodies as distinctly as the rest of the world, but of gross mundane sounds and noises are unconscious as the adder-Miss Martineau is very deaf indeed. Here then was an obvious subject for experiment, and having been so easily cured of one infirmity it seems only natural that it should have occurred to the patient to apply instanter to the same agency for relief from another disabilitythat she should have requested her mesmerizer to quicken her hearing as well as her pace. But on the contrary, her ears seem quite to have slipped out of her head; and at an advanced stage of the proceedings we find her awaiting J.'s revelations, "with an American friend repeating to her on the instant, on account of her deafness, every word as it fell." And to make the omission more glaring, it is in the midst of speculations on the mesmeric sharpening of another sense, till it can see through deal-boards, millstones, and "barricadoes as lustrous as ebony," that she neglects to ascertain whether her hearing might not be so improved as to perceive sounds through no denser medium than the common air! Such an interesting experiment in her own person ought surely to have preceded the trials whether "§.” could see, and draw ships and churches with her eyes shut; and the still more remote inquiry whether at the day of judgment we are to rise with or without our bodies, including the auricular organs. If dull people can be cured of stone deafness by a few magnetic passes, so pleasant a fact ought not to be concealed; whatever the consequence to the proprietors of registered Voice Conductors and Cornets.

Along with the experiment, we should have been glad of more circumstantial references to many successful ones merely assumed and asserted. There is, indeed, nothing throughout the Letters more singular than the complacency with which we are expected to take disputed matters for granted; as if all her readers were in magnetic rapport with the authoress, thinking as she thinks, seeing as she sees, and believing as she believes. Thus the theory, that the mind of the somnambulist mirrors that of the mesmerizer, is declared pretty clearly proved, "when an igno