delicate nerves, and is often put to it for resolution to go through his duties. A late popular preacher, well known in all Protestant communities, was for many years afflicted with a nervous affection amounting to disease, being seldom able to sleep on the Saturday night, and excited for weeks beforehand in prospect of an engagement requiring special effort. Yet, singularly enough, and this illustrates the freaks of nervousness, the morbid feeling never troubled this good man when in the pulpit. Burdened and oppressed up to the moment of entering the sanctuary, he had no sooner faced the audience he was about to address, than his fears vanished, and the dread, that, like an evil spirit had possessed him, suddenly and completely took its departure. A very convenient and timely riddance, but how grevious the affliction that needed it! Some can barely or not at all bring themselves to join a crowd. They cannot endure a seat in a place of worship, and will slip into an adjoining apartment where they can hear the preacher without being seen by the congregation. The next thing to this is when a man's courage cannot be screwed higher than to occupy a favourite seat in church, say with his back to the wall, or very near the door of the building. The case of the poet Cowper is too well known for lengthy narration. Everybody can recall in thought the meek and gentle spirit, obliged to relinquish a lucrative post under Government, because the duties of the office required that he should read certain documents before the House of Commons. Interest and friendship combined could not overcome his reluctance to be thus prominent-the public appearance was unendurable-and the situation had to be abandoned. This instance serves another purpose. It to some extent protects the reputation of the class to which this man of genius belonged. For it is evident that nervousness is not necessarily allied to general intellectual weakness.

Nervous people, unless they happen to be on terms of perfect familiarity, seldom get on comfortably together. A feeling of bashful uneasiness prevents all freedom, and consequently all enjoyment in each other's society. Each is under restraint, and each knows that the other is as unhappy as himself. Therefore both are relieved when the interview ceases. The timorous man feels most at home in the presence of individuals entirely free from his own sensitiveness-particularly if they be persons of plain manners and cheerful disposition, who do not torment their acquaintances by standing upon ceremony, and whose ready talk prevents their being burdensome to the conversational powers of others.

The dread of detection is one of the chief aggravations of nervousness. The timid make their awkwardness infinitely worse by striving to conceal it. The wisest plan would be to anticipate

discovery by the frank avowal of one's failing. Such a bold and open course would be found the best means of obtaining relief. It would free the mind from palpitating suspense and do away with the imaginary part of the difficulty. And we may depend upon it, that those who hear the confession will not suppose the weakness to be any greater than it is-but will rather conclude that the speaker is exaggerating, and that the man who puts such a bold front on his case, cannot be so very helpless after all. We sometimes hear public speakers resort to this method of plucking up their courage and enlisting the sympathies of their audience" Whistling aloud to bear their courage up."

None need more pity and indulgence than the class we have been describing. Persons not similarly afflicted can form no conception of the endless variety of ways in which sensitive spirits are chafed by the friction of common events. It is as if the outer coating of the skin were removed, exposing that delicate under layer, composed of mucous tissue, to which contact with the atmosphere or rays of light would bring irritation, and upon which every grosser touch would inflict intensest pain. The enduring of a loss or disappointment, the discharge of ordidinary matters of business, and a thousand things that might be named, which, to the vigorous and self-possessed, are but as the fleeting clouds that cast a momentary shadow upon the side of a hill, are, to the nervous, as the slowly gathering clouds of a tempest, dark and lowering, charged with lightning, big with portents. The grasshopper becomes a burden, and a real one too, for trouble and hardship are relative terms. The little griefs of a child are to it as formidable as the great sorrows of the man will be in after years; and the vexations that buoyant spirits could laugh at, and elastic frames shake off, tax the powers of the diffident to the utmost limits of endurance.

The phenomena of nervousness illustrate what may be termed the moral and spiritual aspects of our physical nature; showing how we may reach, for good or evil, the higher part of our complex being by means of the lower. Improve the latter, and the tone of the former, other things being equal, will profit by the change. A fact this which has an important bearing upon the general subject of education, especially in the training of children. at whose age body and mind are tender and mutually plastic, each importing to and receiving from the other, impressions that last for life. Childhood is eminently the period in which to form a bold and vigorous habit of mind. Adults may do something for themselves, but, unhappily, by the time a man has made the discovery that he belongs to the class of the nervous, it is wellnigh too late to take steps that shall effect a cure. Even at this late stage, however, much might be done, by resolute and

systematic effort, to mitigate the evil and check its rankest growth. But, in order to effect a cure, the case must be taken in hand early, and that by the kind offices of guardians and teachers, before the patient is old enough to prescribe for himself. Counteractive measures, both moral and physical, should be adopted as soon as symptoms of nervousness make their appearance. Where there is an unnatural love of retirement, let the child be brought much into society-if animals be a terror, encourage it to touch and fondle them-if darkness, accustom it to walk and go to sleep in the dark-in every case shut out those demons of the minds, the ghost stories of old-fashioned nurseries, that seem contrived for the very purpose of stimulating the feelings to morbid activity,and which have impaired the nervous system of many a hapless victim. Withal, let strict attention be paid to the general laws of health, that bone, muscle and nerve may grow strong and firm, supplying in a robust and vigorous fraine, one of the conditions of a sound mental constitution.

THE DROLLS, TRADITIONS, AND SUPERSTITIONS OF OLD CORNWALL.*

MR. HUNT was happily led by taste and favouring circumstances to commence, thirty-five years ago, the collection of the romances contained in these volumes. When a boy he was much fas cinated by the Cornish legends, and then he began to keep a written record of the tales which he heard. Subsequently he became Secretary of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, a position in which he had the best opportunities for gathering together the "waifs and stories which were floating on the sea of time," and rapidly disappearing. In the discharge of his official duties he had orten to go into the mining and agricultural districts, and thus he was brought into intimate relation with the miners and peasantry. "The bold shores of St. Just-the dark and rock-clad hills of Morva, Zennor and St. Ives-the barren regions of St. Agnes-the sandy undulations of Perranzabuloethe sterile tracts of Gwennap-the howling moorlands of St. Austell and Bodmin-and indeed every district in which there was a mine became familiar ground. Away from the towns, at a period when the means of communication were few, and those

*The Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall. By R. Hunt.

few tedious, primitive manners still lingered. Education was not then as now the fashion. Church-schools were few and far between; and Wesleyan-Methodism-although it was infusing truth and goodness among the people--had not yet become conscious of the importance of properly educating the young. Always delighting in hearing popular tales, no opportunity of hearing them was ever lost. Seated on a three-legged stool or in a timberen settle,' near the blazing heath-fire on the bearth, have I elicited the old stories of which the people were beginning to be ashamed. Resting in a level, after the toil of climbing from the depths of a mine, in close companionship with the homely miner, his superstitions and the tales which he had heard from his grandfather have been confided to me." If Mr. Hunt had not accomplished the principal part of his work in the lifetime of the generation which has now well-nigh passed away, the preservation of these tales would have been impossible. He says, "I cannot but consider myself fortunate in having collected these traditions thirty-five years ago. They could not be collected now. Mr. J. O. Halliwell speaks of the difficulties he experienced in his endeavours to obtain a story. The common people think they will be laughed at if they tell their "ould drolls" to a stranger. Beyond this many of the stories have died out with those who told them. In the autumn of 1862, being very desirous of getting every example of folk-lore which existed in the remote parishes of Zennor and Morva, I employed the late C. Taylor Stephens, sometime rural postman from St. Ives to Zennor, and the author of "The Chief of Barat-Anac," to hunt over the district. This he did with especial care, and the result of his labours are included in these pages. The postman and poet, although he spent many days and nights amidst the peasantry, failed to procure stories which had been told me without hesitation, thirty years before." In the first series Mr. Hunt has given the tales which belong to the earliest inhabitants. They are of unknown date, probably going back beyond the commencement of the Christian era. The romances of the second series belong certainly to the historic period, though the precise ages of them is very uncertain. The volumes contain the genuine household current tales of the people. They were all once being told in the homes of the inhabitants of Cornwall.

We always supposed that the Cornish people, in common with every other part of the Celtic race, were very superstitious; but we had no idea before reading this work to what extent belief in giants, fairies, mermaids, demons, and witchcraft prevailed in "Old Cornwall." Here are two goodly-sized octavo volumes filled with some of the legends and wild delusions which held for ages and still in a measure hold sway over the minds of the

inhabitants of this part of our country. But then Mr. Hunt informs us that these are not all which he has collected, and the number which are given in his volumes is as nothing compared with the many which have been irretrievably lost. Surely "Old Cornwall" must have been a Land of Goshen for the sprites and hobgoblins who luxuriated in wild profusion among the hills, in the valleys, under the rocks, along the shores, and around every dwelling in the land of the Western Celt. We know something of the legends which once obtained in Wales-their number and very strange character. We have heard and read of traditions and superstitions of Devonshire, but never before perusing Mr. Hunt's work had we formed acquaintance with so many narratives respecting unearthly beings moving, acting among, and influencing rational and irrational creatures. If, by some effort of mind, we could suppose ourselves placed in the circumstances of the people of Cornwall of little more than half a century ago, how very unprosaic and mysterious would be the motive power of our actions. We should be impelled and restrained by pixies, knockers, wishers, cunning people, and fairies, who exerted an irresistible and wide-spread influence over all the affairs of life. A Cornish writer of recent date says, "Within my remembrance there were conjuring parsons and cunning clerks; every blacksmith was a doctor, every old woman a witch. In short, all nature seemed to be united-its wells, its plants, its birds, its beasts, its reptiles, and even inanimate things-in sympathising with human credulity, in predicting, relieving, and aggravating misfortune." A people so completely under the power of infatuation are not easily rid of the hold it has upon them. The diffusion of education among the inhabitants of Cornwall, and the spread among them of religious and scientific knowledge, within the last twenty years have not availed to exorcise superstitious belief in non-existent forms of demoniacal agency. Even now there is a general clinging to the pernicious ideas and practices which ought to have perished long since. Cases frequently come to light, sometimes of so gross a character as to require magisterial interference, showing how miserably deluded are many of the descendants of those whose dark weird opinions Mr. Hunt has saved for us. At the present time the sick occasionally resort to holy wells for cure-spells are not entirely gone out of fashion. Was there not a tale of this day inserted in "Notes and Queries" a short time since which told us of a pixy-led school-boy who was borne away with a number of little folk through the air, pronouncing strange and magical words, from Polperro to Seaton Beach, and thence to the cellar of the King of France? And here is an instance which looks like one of recent date taken from Mr. Hunt's book. "D' ye see that 'ere hoss there,' said a Liskeard