A stroke of personal ridicule is levelled at Dryden, when Bayes informs us of his preparations for a course of study by a course of medicine!  “When I have a grand design,” says he, “I ever take physic and let blood; for when you would have pure swiftness of thought, and fiery flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part; in fine, you must purge the belly!” Such was really the practice of the poet, as Le Motte, who was a physician, informs us, and in his medical character did not perceive that ridicule in the subject which the wits and most readers unquestionably have enjoyed.  The wits here were as cruel against truth as against Dryden; for we must still consider this practice, to use their own words, as “an excellent recipe for writing.”  Among other philosophers, one of the most famous disputants of antiquity, Carneades, was accustomed to take copious doses of white hellebore, a great aperient, as a preparation to refute the dogmas of the stoics.  “The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a dose of salts; but one can’t take them like champagne,” said Lord Byron.  Dryden’s practice was neither whimsical nor peculiar to the poet; he was of a full habit, and, no doubt, had often found by experience the beneficial effects without being aware of the cause, which is nothing less than the reciprocal influence of mind and body.

This simple fact is, indeed, connected with one of the most important inquiries in the history of man—­the laws which regulate the invisible union of the soul with the body:  in a word, the inscrutable mystery of our being!—­a secret, but an undoubted intercourse, which probably must ever elude our perceptions.  The combination of metaphysics with physics has only been productive of the wildest fairy tales among philosophers:  with one party the soul seems to pass away in its last puff of air, while man seems to perish in “dust to dust;” the other as successfully gets rid of our bodies altogether, by denying the existence of matter.  We are not certain that mind and matter are distinct existences, since the one may be only a modification of the other; however this great mystery be imagined, we shall find with Dr. Gregory, in his lectures “on the duties and qualifications of a physician,” that it forms an equally necessary inquiry in the sciences of morals and of medicine.

Whether we consider the vulgar distinction of mind and body as an union, or as a modified existence, no philosopher denies that a reciprocal action takes place between our moral and physical condition.  Of these sympathies, like many other mysteries of nature, the cause remains occult, while the effects are obvious.  This close, yet inscrutable association, this concealed correspondence of parts seemingly unconnected, in a word, this reciprocal influence of the mind and the body, has long fixed the attention of medical and metaphysical inquirers; the one having the care of our exterior organization, the other that of the