be possible to dislodge and destroy them systematically. If they follow and infest man after the manner of parasites, whatever renders living parasites impossible to exist will do the same for the seeds of these diseases.

There are just six places in which the poisoning seeds of these diseases can lurk, and out of which they can be evolved. For our purpose it does not signify whether we adopt the old doctrine of specific contagion, and believe that no case of either of these diseases can arise except from a pre-existing case; or whether we accept the newer doctrine, that they spring up from time to time out of the decaying organic matter which surrounds us. In either case the habitat must be the same.

I

1. It may be the skin. From want of simple ablution, layers of disused scarf-skin are carried about for months or years. have seen a child brought for advice for " debility" after scarlet fever, and furnished with cod-liver oil and steel from a dispensary. But the surface of the body, where protected by clothes, was covered with blackened cuticle, never washed off nor intended to be. Some persons believe that a fragment of scarf-skin adhering to a letter sent by post will convey the infection of scarlet fever. If that be true, what must not one child do, unwashed after the illness?

2. It may be the wearing apparel. Few persons reflect on the time during which wearing apparel of woollen materials is used among the poor, and the number of persons, children and others, whom it serves in succession as "it passes through" its stages of disintegration. When examining the vaccination of children, I have been ready to faint at the odour of old woollen clothes, hidden under pinafores, thoroughly rotten, fastened in by pins, and evidently saturated with the exhalations of years. I have seen in an infant school thirty-three, with dirty skins and dresses, in a space of nine feet by five, and fifty-five others in a space of twelve feet by six, sitting close together, side by side, in three rows: the heat from their bodies as perceptible to the hand at a little distance as the heat from a tea-urn. Is disease, and its propagation, inexplicable on these terms? The Vicar of Wakefield chose his wife as she did her silk gown, in the hope that it would wear many years. Cheap cotton is better for people who cannot afford a new gown often.

3. It may be in carpets, curtains, bedding, and other fixed articles of clothing: and

But

4. It may be in houses. Every one can distinguish the atmosphere of a newly-cleansed house, and the air of exhilaration and increased health which follows the operations of the painter. rooms are too often covered with flimsy absorbent papers-(a a respectable witness tells me that he has counted eight layers in a poor house, each riddled with vermin); and although a wash of lime or of cheap color is wholesomer than paper, yet the size with which colors are mixed is decomposable and the surface absorbent. I

know a lying-in hospital from which puerperal fever was never absent until the walls were scraped. The spaces between floors and ceilings in old houses are too often full of, filthy débris, and even the floors themselves, porous and worm-eaten, are a harbor for parasitic animals; and where these can lodge, there surely may be germs of disease.

5. It may be in collection of refuse matter in sewers, drains, and dust-bins. The evidence that scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and cholera are the direct fruits of drain poison, is to my mind indisputable. At any rate, if organic poisons lurk anywhere, they can lurk here. Wherever a house swarms with flies, it is demonstrable that decaying organic matter must exist, and where this exists the poison of pestilence may accompany it.

6. The earth itself on which houses are built, may contain the material for exhalations. No sane person will inhabit a house built over made earth, if he can help it.

These propositions may be trite and self-evident to philosophers, but to the mass of the population, and their ordinary teachers, they are still a new, strange, and troublesome heresy;-that poisons, if they exist among us, can be hunted down, and extirpated out of the places in which their existence is possible, seems a strange doctrine; as in the admirable history in the Bible, the Leper will do anything "great," he will swallow a drug, or suffer an exorcism, but will not condescend simply to wash; in fact, seeing the protection afforded by vaccination against pestilence, the public ask for more of the same sort; the medical journals contain from time to time accounts of attempts to inoculate measles, and whooping-cough; cowkeepers inoculate the animals whom they keep in their reeking stalls to protect them from pneumonia, and vicarious diseases may be a substitute for cleanliness. Instead of exterminating an invader, we crouch under a shield which we hope will make us invulnerable.

This is the position of the public mind with regard to vaccination. So soon as an alarm of smallpox is raised, the population flock to the doors of the vaccinator and fill the street, clamoring for re-vaccination, and they allow their children to be examined and vaccinated in the schools. Whoever examines such children must see skins and clothes, and whoever follows them home must see such houses, bedding, and collections of refuse, or foul state of the earth, as must breed and propagate disease. But these things are not reformed by the people who willingly submit to vaccination.

I have the greatest hope that the recent outbreak of smallpox may have the most beneficial effects, by demonstrating the failure, or at least the imperfection necessarily inherent in the protective system, and so concentrate the public attention on the necessity of eradicating the germs, by systematic cleanliness. The recent outbreak has shown that multitudes of persons exist, who cannot be secured against the smallpox, either by a previous attack of

that disease, or by vaccination, or by both. It shows, further, that sources of infection must exist outside the living body, which, like other epidemic poisons, are called into activity from time to time by causes yet unknown. To ascribe a periodic visitation of smallpox to the neglect of vaccination, is one of those curious propositions which can only be made by those who look upon the smallpox as a disease apart, and not governed by the same laws as govern other epidemics. It were just as rational to attribute the late prevalence of ague to a neglect of quinine. But it does prove conclusively that whilst the non-vaccinated are sure to suffer, neither those who have had the smallpox itself, nor those who have had the vicarious disease twice, are safe; and that absolute safety can only be got in time, by systematic eradication of the poison in its lurking-places.

During the last century, skin diseases, accompanied with parasitic animals, have almost disappeared from England; a hundred years ago, the morbus pedicularis was common in hospitals; ointments and lotions were prescribed for it, and I am informed on good authority, that fifty years ago the eradication of these insects from schools would have been considered a hopeless and irrational refinement, the insects being considered a sign of health rather than otherwise. Simple soap and water have put an end to them; and there is no doubt in my mind that similar means could get rid of these domestic pestilences which follow us like parasites.

To effect this, the young must be systematically and patiently, not casually and verbally, instructed in the duty and privilege of cleanliness, and in all its details. The clergy might aid in the work by showing the literal application of many excellent precepts in the Old Testament.

At the same time that personal cleanliness is taught, house cleanliness requires to be enforced more vigorously. The houses inhabited by the poor, let out in single or double rooms occupied day and night, cannot be kept healthy unless every room be emptied, and the walls, floor, and ceiling cleansed once a year; nor unless the removal of refuse, and the chemical deodorization of sinks and closets be effected at least once a week. If the owners of houses neglect this, the medical officers of health in London can do much to compel them.

In conclusion, I venture to say that a more cheap and speedy method of ejecting weekly lodgers is one of the wants of the day. It would enable society to control some who now set it at defiance; and it would be another instrument for that hunting down of filth, idleness, and ignorance which alone can in time eradicate the domestic pestilences.

LVI.-MADAME RECAMIER.

(Concluded from p. 305.)

MADAME RECAMIER's return to Paris was hailed by her friends with a triumphant joy which surrounded her with a thousand evidences that absence, so far from diminishing, had but increased her power.

It would be in vain to attempt to chronicle even the names of the distinguished persons who formed her society. She continued her relations with the family and friends of Bonaparte, with the same disinterested courage with which she had clung to her royalist connexions when they were on the losing side, and her house became a neutral ground of meeting for all parties, and all shades of opinion. All the illustribus foreigners whom the Restoration had assembled in Paris were presented to her, amongst others the Duke of Wellington, whose admiration for Madame Recamier did not lend him sufficient tact to avoid offending her, and their acquaintance did not progress into friendship. M. Recamier's affairs, though not so flourishing as they had been before his bankruptcy, were sufficiently prosperous to enable Madame Recamier to resume most of the comforts and luxuries to which she had been accustomed, and the deprivation of which she had severely felt. The death of Madame de Staël, which happened in the summer of 1817, was a great griefto Madame Recamier, and is the only circumstance we must pause to note, until the year 1818, when M. de Chateaubriand, who had been presented to her about a year previously, first began his intimacy with her. Dazzled by his literary reputation, full of admiration of his genius, and with many points of sympathy in common, Madame Recamier not only exercised, but in this case owned, a sway which was henceforth to occasion her many hours of pain, and much anxiety;-his affection and his vanity were alike exacting, and Madame Recamier devoted her life to content both. The chivalrous fidelity of Matthieu de Montmorency, the unselfish and noble affection of Ballanche, failed to gain the place in her heart which she accorded to the irritable and egotistical Genius from the very commencement of their friendship. Whether her feminine nature was weary of receiving instead of giving, and found a satisfaction in the daily and hourly opportunities of small self-sacrifices, which M. de Chateaubriand did not spare her, it would be hard to say. There is no doubt, however, that her influence over him was extreme, and that after long years of patient affection the fruits evident in the softening of many asperities, and the ennobling of many small weaknesses which marred his otherwise fine character and good heart.

were

Her other friends did not see this new friendship without some pain; but with disinterested regard, it was more for her future peace,

than for themselves that they trembled. She was warned, but in vain, and henceforth the morning's note, and the afternoon's visit from Chateaubriand were the most important events of her day.

M. Recamier's affairs became again involved, and in 1819 Madame Recamier (after having uselessly sacrificed part of the fortune she inherited from her mother) once more renounced the gaieties of society and established herself in a quiet tranquil retreat, in which she was destined to pass the last years of her life. Her father, his old friend M. Simonard, and M. Recamier resided in the neighborhood, and she herself took a small apartment on the third floor, in the Convent of the Abbaye au Bois. Her existence was henceforth still more independent than it had ever been; and, without failing in any kindness or any duty to the three aged men, her domestic life was now freed from any external bond, and the care of her niece and the daily visits of her friends were the home ties which filled and satisfied her heart. We give the account of her new abode in the words of Chateaubriand himself: "The bedroom was furnished with a bookcase, a harp, a piano, a portrait of Madame de Staël, and a view of Coppet by moonlight. When, quite out of breath from having climbed three flights of stairs, I entered the cellule at evening, I was enchanted: the windows looked on the garden of the Abbaye, and in the green space nuns were walking and schoolgirls playing. The top of an acacia-tree reached the level of our eyes; pointed spires stood against the sky, and in the distance were the hills of Sèvres. The setting sun shining in at the open windows lit up the picture. Birds were perched on the raised blinds."

Here dwelt Madame Recamier, and, except a rare visit to the play, she was no longer seen again at any Parisian amusement. And yet, never did she take a more active interest in political events than at this time, and her influence, though quiet and unobtrusive, was exerted almost daily for the service and advancement of her friends. But all she did and all she thought of, was so entirely for the welfare of others, that we should lose sight of herself did we trace the events which absorbed her during the next few years.

M. de Chateaubriand went as ambassador to Berlin for a few months in 1821, and to England in the same capacity in the following year. He left England to attend the Congress at Verona, a mission he ardently desired and with some difficulty obtained. Matthieu de Montmorency, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, also attended the Congress, and each wrote to Madame Recamier his complaints and discontent at the conduct of the other. Her office between them was to pacify, to explain, and to suffer, and she fulfilled it with admirable patience and sweetness.

Without entering into the ministerial intrigues of the year 1822, or even alluding to the political events in which they originated, it suffices to note the two facts which principally concerned Madame Recamier. On the 25th of December, the Duc Matthieu de Mont