Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. V, October, 1850, Volume I.

In laying a foundation of ill health, it is a great point to be able to begin at the beginning. You have the future man at excellent advantage when he is between your fingers as a baby. One of Hoffman's heroines, a clever housewife, discarded and abhorred her lover from the moment of his cutting a yeast dumpling. There are some little enormities of that kind which really can not be forgiven, and one such is, to miss the opportunity of physicking a baby. Now I will tell you how to treat the future pale-face at his first entrance into life.

A little while before the birth of any child, have a little something ready in a spoon; and, after birth, be ready at the first opportunity, to thrust this down his throat. Let his first gift from his fellow-creatures be a dose of physic-honey and calomel, or something of that kind: but you had better ask the nurse for a prescription. Have ready also, before birth, an abundant stock of pins; for it is a great point, in putting the first dress upon the little naked body, to contrive that it shall contain as many pins as possible. The prick of a sly pin is excellent for making children cry; and since it may lead nurses, mothers, now and then even doctors, to administer physic for the cure of imaginary gripings in the bowels, it may be twice blessed. Sanitary enthusiasts are apt to say that strings, not pins, are the right fastening for infants' clothes. Be not misled. Is not the pincushion an ancient institution? What is to say, "Welcome, little stranger," if pins cease to do so? Resist this innovation. It is the small end of the wedge. The next thing that a child would do, if let alone, would be to sleep. I would not suffer that. The poor thing must want feeding; therefore waken it and make it eat a sop, for that will be a pleasant joke at the expense of nature. It will be like wakening a gentleman after midnight to put into his mouth some pickled herring; only the baby can not thank you for your kindness as the gentleman might do.

This is a golden rule concerning babies: to procure sickly growth, let the child always suckle. Attempt no regularity in nursing. It is true that if an infant be fed at the breast every four hours, it will fall into the habit of desiring food only so often, and will sleep very tranquilly during the interval. This may save trouble, but it is a device for rearing healthy children: we discard it. Our infants shall be nursed in no new-fangled way. As for the child's crying, [pg 602] quiet costs eighteen-pence a bottle; so that argument is very soon disposed of.

Never be without a flask of Godfrey's Cordial, or Daffy, in the nursery; but the fact is, that you ought to keep a medicine-chest. A good deal of curious information may be obtained by watching the effects of various medicines upon your children.

Never be guided by the child's teeth in weaning it. Wean it before the first teeth are cut, or after they have learned to bite. Wean all at once, with bitter aloes or some similar devices; and change the diet suddenly. It is a foolish thing to ask a medical attendant how to regulate the food of children; he is sure to be over-run with bookish prejudices; but nurses are practical women, who understand thoroughly matters of this kind.

Do not use a cot for infants, or presume beyond the time-honored institution of the cradle. Active rocking sends a child to sleep by causing giddiness. Giddiness is a disturbance of the blood's usual way of circulation; obviously, therefore, it is a thing to aim at in our nurseries. For elder children, swinging is an excellent amusement, if they become giddy on the swing.

In your nursery, a maid and two or three children may conveniently be quartered for the night, by all means carefully secured from draughts. Never omit to use at night a chimney board. The nursery window ought not to be much opened; and the door should be kept always shut, in order that the clamor of the children may not annoy others in your house.

When the children walk out for an airing, of course they are to be little ladies and gentlemen. They are not to scamper to and fro; a little gentle amble with a hoop ought to be their severest exercise. In sending them to walk abroad, it is a good thing to let their legs be bare. The gentleman papa, probably, would find bare legs rather cold walking in the streets of London; but the gentleman son, of course, has quite another constitution. Besides, how can a boy, not predisposed that way, hope to grow up consumptive, if some pains are not taken with him in his childhood?

It is said that of old time children in the Balearic Islands were not allowed to eat their dinner, until, by adroitness in the shooting of stones out of a sling, they had dislodged it from a rafter in the house. Children in the British Islands should be better treated. Let them not only have their meals unfailingly, but let them be at all other times tempted and bribed to eat. Cakes and sweetmeats of alluring shape and color, fruits, and palatable messes, should, without any regularity, be added to the diet of a child. The stomach, we know, requires three or four hours to digest a meal, expects a moderate routine of tasks, and between each task looks for a little period of rest. Now, as we hope to create a weak digestion, what is more obvious than that we must use artifice to circumvent the stomach? In one hour we must come upon it unexpectedly with a dose of fruit and sugar; then, if the regular dinner have been taken, astonish the digestion, while at work upon it, with the appearance of an extra lump of cake, and presently some gooseberries. In this way we soon triumph over Nature, who, to speak truth, does not permit to us an easy victory, and does try to accommodate her working to our whims. We triumph, and obtain our reward in children pale and polite, children with appetites already formed, that will become our good allies against their health in after life.

Principiis obsta. Let us subdue mere nature at her first start, and make her civilized in her beginnings. Let us wipe the rose-tint out of the child's cheek, in good hope that the man will not be able to recover it. White, yellow, and purple-let us make them to be his future tricolor.

Brick walls do not secrete air. It comes in through your doors and windows, from the streets and alleys in your neighborhood; it comes in without scraping its feet, and goes down your throat, unwashed, with small respect for your gentility. You must look abroad, therefore, for some elements of an unwholesome home: and when, sitting at home, you do so, it is a good thing if you can see a burial-ground-one of "God's gardens," which our city cherishes.

Now, do not look up with a dolorous face, saying, "Alas! these gardens are to be taken from us!" Let agitators write and let Commissioners report, let Government nod its good-will, and although all the world may think that our London burial-grounds are about to be incontinently jacketed in asphalte, and that we ourselves, when dead, are to be steamed off to Erith-we are content: at present this is only gossip.1 On one of the lowest terraces of hell, says Dante, he found a Cordelier, who had been dragged thither by a logical demon, in defiance of the expostulations of St. Francis. The sin of that monk was a sentence of advice for which absolution had been received before he gave it: "Promise much, and perform little." In the hair of any Minister's head, and of every Commissioner's head, we know not what "black cherubim" may have entwined their claws. There is hope, while there is life, for the old cause. But if those who have authority to do so really have determined to abolish intramural burial, let us call upon them solemnly to reconsider their verdict. Let them ponder what follows.

Two or three years ago, a book, promulgating notions upon spiritual life, was published in London by the Chancellor of a certain place across the Channel. It was a clever book; and, among other matter, broached a theory. "Our souls," the Rev. Chancellor informed us, "consist of the essence, extract, or gas contained in the human body;" and, that he might not be [pg 603] vague, he made special application to a chemist, who "added some important observations of his own respecting the corpse after death." But we must decorate a great speculation with the ornamental words of its propounder.

"The gases into which the animal body is resolved by putrefaction are ammonia, carbonic acid, carbonic oxide, cyanogen, and sulphureted, phosphureted, and carbureted hydrogen. The first, and the two last-named gases, are most abundant." We omit here some details as to the time a body takes in rotting. "From which it appears, that these noble elements and rich essences of humanity are too subtle and volatile to continue long with the corpse; but soon disengage themselves, and escape from it. After which nothing remains but the foul refuse in the vat; the mere caput mortuum in the crucible; the vile dust and ashes of the tomb. Nor does inhumation, however deep in the ground, nor drowning in the lowest depths and darkest caverns of the fathomless abyss, prevent those subtle essences, rare attenuate spirits, or gases, from escaping; or chain down to dust those better, nobler elements of the human body. No bars can imprison them; no vessels detain them from their kindred element, confine them from their native home."

We are all of us familiar with the more noticeable of these "essences," by smell, if not by name. Metaphysicians tell us that perceptions and ideas will follow in a train: perhaps that may account for the sudden recollection of an old-fashioned story-may the moderns pardon it. A young Cambridge student, airing his wisdom at a dinner-party, was ingenious upon the Theory of Winds. He was most eloquent concerning heat and cold; radiation, rarefaction; polar and equatorial currents; he had brought his peroration to a close, when he turned round upon a grave Professor of his College, saying, "And what, sir, do you believe to be the cause of wind?" The learned man replied, "Pea-soup-pea-soup!" In the group of friends around a social soup-tureen, must we in future recognize

"The feast of reason, and-the flow of soul!"

How gladly shall we fight the fight of life, hoping that, after death, we shall meet in a world of sulphureted hydrogen and other gases! And where do the Sanitary Reformers suppose that, after death, their gases will go-they who, in life, with asphalte and paving-stones, would have restrained the souls of their own fathers from ascending into upper air?

Against us let there be no such reproach. Freely let us breathe into our bosoms some portion of the spirit of the dead. If we live near no church-yard, let us visit one-Mesmerically, if you please. Now we are on the way. We see narrow streets and many people; most of the faces that we meet are pale. Here is a walking funeral; we follow with it to the church-yard. A corner is turned, and there is another funeral to be perceived at no great distance in advance. Our walkers trot. The other party, finding itself almost overtaken, sets off with a decent run. Our party runs. There is a race for prior attention when they reach the ground. We become interested. We perceive that one undertaker wears gaiters, and the other straps. We trot behind them, betting with each other, you on Gaiters, I on Straps. I win; a Deus ex machina saves me, or I should have lost. An over-goaded ox rushes bewildered round a corner, charges and overthrows the foremost coffin; it is broken, and the body is exposed-its white shroud flaps upon the mud. This has occurred once, I know; and how much oftener, I know not. So Gaiters pioneers his party to the nearest undertaker for repairs, and we follow the triumphant procession to the church-yard. The minister there meets it, holding his white handkerchief most closely to his nose: the mourners imitate him, sick and sorrowful. Your toe sticks in a bit of carrion, as we pass near the grave and seek the sexton. He is a pimpled man, who moralizes much; but his morality is maudlin. He is drunk. He is accustomed to antagonize the "spirits" of the dead with spirits from the "Pig and Whistle." Here let the séance end.

At home again, let us remark upon a striking fact. Those poor creatures whom we saw in sorrow by the grave, believed that they were sowing flesh to immortality-and so they were. They did not know that they were also sowing coffee. By a trustworthy informant, I am taught that of the old coffin-wood dug up out of the crowded church-yards, a large quantity that is not burned, is dried and ground; and that ground coffee is therewith adulterated in a wholesale manner. It communicates to cheap coffee a good color; and puts Body into it, there can be no doubt of that. It will be a severe blow to the trade in British coffees if intramural interment be forbidden. We shall be driven to depend upon distant planters for what now can be produced in any quantity at home.

Remember the largeness of the interests involved. Within the last thirty years, a million and a half of corpses have been hidden under ground, in patches, here and there, among the streets of London. This pasturage we have enjoyed from our youth up, and it is threatened now to put us off our feed.

I say no more, for better arguments than these can not be urged on behalf of the maintenance of City grave-yards. Possibly these may not prevail. Yet never droop. Nevertheless, without despairing, take a house in the vicinity of such a garden of the dead. If our lawgivers should fear the becoming neighborly with Dante's Cordelier, and therefore absolutely interdict more burials in London, still you are safe. They shall not trample on the graves that are. We can agitate, and we will agitate successfully against their asphalte. Let the City be mindful of its old renown; let Vestries rally round Sir Peter Laurie, and there may be yet secured to you, for seven years to come, an atmosphere which shall assist in making Home Unhealthy.

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By the consent of antiquity, it is determined that Pain shall be doorkeeper to the house of Pleasure. In Europe Purgatory led to Paradise; and, had St. Symeon lived among us now, he would have earned heaven, if the police permitted, by praying for it, during thirty years, upon the summit of a lamp-post. In India the Fakir was beatified by standing on his head, under a hot sun, beset with roasting bonfires. In Greenland the soul expected to reach bliss by sliding for five days down a rugged rock, wounding itself, and shivering with cold.

The American Indians sought happiness through castigation, and considered vomits the most expeditious mode of enforcing self-denial on the stomach. Some tribes of Africans believe, that on the way to heaven every man's head is knocked against a wall. By consent of mankind, therefore, it is granted that we must pass Pain on the way to Pleasure.

What Pleasure is, when reached, none but the dogmatical can venture to determine. To Greenlanders, a spacious fish-kettle, forever simmering, in which boiled seals forever swim, is the delight of heaven. And remember that, in the opinion of M. Bailly, Adam and Eve gardened in Nova Zembla.

You will not be surprised, therefore, if I call upon you to prepare for your domestic pleasures with a little suffering; nor, when I tell you what such pleasures are, must you exclaim against them as absurd. Having the sanction of our forefathers, they are what is fashionable now, and consequently they are what is fit.

I propose, then, that you should give, for the entertainment of your friends, an Evening Party; and as this is a scene in which young ladies prominently figure, I will, if you please, on this occasion, pay particular attention to your daughter.

O mystery of preparation!-Pardon, sir. You err if you suppose me to insinuate that ladies are more careful over personal adornment than the gentlemen. When men made a display of manhood, wearing beards, it is recorded that they packed them, when they went to bed, in pasteboard cases, lest they might be tumbled in the night. Man at his grimmest is as vain as woman, even when he stalks about bearded and battle-axed. This is the mystery of preparation in your daughter's case: How does she breathe? You have prepared her from childhood for the part she is to play to-night, by training her form into the only shape which can be looked at with complacency in any ball-room. A machine, called stays, introduced long since into England by the Normans, has had her in its grip from early girlhood. She has become pale, and-only the least bit-liable to be blue about the nose and fingers.

Stays are an excellent contrivance; they give a material support to the old cause, Unhealthiness at Home. This is the secret of their excellence. A woman's ribs are narrow at the top, and as they approach the waist they widen, to allow room for the lungs to play within them. If you can prevent the ribs from widening, you can prevent the lungs from playing, which they have no right to do, and make them work. This you accomplish by the agency of stays. It fortunately happens that these lungs have work to do-the putting of the breath of life into the blood-which they are unable to do properly when cramped for space; it becomes about as difficult to them as it would be to you to play the trombone in a china closet. By this compression of the chest, ladies are made nervous, and become unfit for much exertion; they do not, however, allow us to suppose that they have lost flesh. There is a fiction of attire which would induce, in a speculative critic, the belief that some internal flame had caused their waists to gutter, and that the ribs had all run down into a lump which protrudes behind under the waistband. This appearance is, I think, a fiction; and for my opinion I have newspaper authority. In the papers it was written, one day last year, that the hump alluded to was tested with a pin, upon the person of a lady, coming from the Isle of Man, and it was found not to be sensitive. Brandy exuded from the wound; for in that case the projection was a bladder, in which the prudent housewife was smuggling comfort in a quiet way. The touch of a pin changed all into discomfort, when she found that she was converted into a peripatetic watering-can-brandying-can, I should have said.

Your daughter comes down stairs dressed, with a bouquet, at a time when the dull seeker of Health and Strength would have her to go up stairs with a bed-candlestick. Your guests arrive. Young ladies, thinly clad and packed in carriages, emerge, half-stifled; put a cold foot, protected by a filmy shoe, upon the pavement, and run, shivering, into your house. Well, sir, we'll warm them presently. But suffer me to leave you now, while you receive your guests.

I know a Phyllis, fresh from the country, who gets up at six and goes to bed at ten; who knows no perfume but a flower-garden, and has worn no bandage to her waist except a sash. She is now in London, and desires to do as others do. She is invited to your party, but is not yet come; it may be well for me to call upon her. Why, in the name of Newgate, what is going on? She is shrieking "Murder!" on the second floor. Up to the rescue! A judicious maid directs me to the drawing-room: "It's only miss a-trying on her stays."

Here we are, sir; Phyllis and I. You find the room oppressive-'tis with perfume, Phyllis. With foul air? ah, your nice country nose detects it; yes, there is foul air: not nasty, of course, my dear, mixed, as it here is, with eau-de-Cologne and patchouli. Pills are not nasty, sugared. A grain or two of arsenic in each might be not quite exactly neutralized by sugar, but there is nothing like faith in a good digestion. Why do the gentlemen cuddle the ladies, and spin about the room with them, like tee-totums? [pg 605] Oh, Phyllis! Phyllis! let me waltz with you. There, do you not see how it is? Faint, are you-giddy-will you fall? An ice will refresh you. Spasms next! Phyllis, let me take you home.

Now then, sir, Phyllis has been put to bed; allow me to dance a polka with your daughter. Frail, elegant creature that she is! A glass of wine-a macaroon: good. Sontag, yes; and that dear novel. That was a delightful dance; now let us promenade. The room is close; a glass of wine, an ice, and let us get to the delicious draught in the conservatory, or by that door. Is it not beautiful? The next quadrille-I look slily at my watch, and Auber's grim chorus rumbles within me, "Voici minuit! voici minuit!" Another dance. How fond she seems to be of macaroons! Supper. My dear sir, I will take good care of your daughter. One sandwich. Champagne. Blanc-mange. Tipsey-cake. Brandy cherries. Glass of wine. A macaroon. Trifle. Jelly. Champagne. Custard. Macaroon. The ladies are being taken care of-Yes, now in their absence we will drink their health, and wink at each other: their and our Bad Healths. This is the happiest moment of our lives; at two in the morning, with a dose of indigestion in the stomach, and three hours more to come before we get to bed. You, my dear sir, hope that on many occasions like the present you may see your friends around you, looking as glassy-eyed as you have made them to look now. We will rejoin the ladies.

Nothing but Champagne could have enabled us to keep up the evening so well. We were getting weary before supper-but we have had some wine, have dug the spur into our sides, and on we go again. At length, even the bottle stimulates our worn-out company no more; and then we separate. Good-night, dear sir; we have spent a Very Pleasant Evening under your roof.

To-morrow, when you depart from a late breakfast, having seen your daughter's face, and her boiled-mackerel eye, knowing that your wife is bilious, and that your son has just gone out for soda-water, you will feel yourself to be a Briton who has done his duty, a man who has paid something on account of his great debt to civilized society.