his malaise, but actually afforded him considerable relief.  Some people who suffer can only suffer in solitude.  They have to devote the whole of their nervous energies to the task of endurance; but others find society an agreeable distraction, and fly to it as an escape from discomfort.  I suppose that every one has experienced at times that extraordinary rebellion, so to speak, of cheerfulness against an attack of physical pain.  There have been days when I have suffered from some small but acutely disagreeable ailment, and yet found my cheerfulness not only not dimmed but apparently enhanced by the physical suffering.  Of course there are maladies even of a serious kind of which one of the symptoms is a great mental depression, but there are other maladies which seem actually to produce an instinctive hopefulness.

But the question is whether it is possible, by sustained effort, to behave independently of one’s mood, and what motive is strong enough to make one detach oneself resolutely from discomforts and woes.  Good manners provide perhaps the most practical assistance.  The people who are brought up with a tradition of highbred courtesy, and who learn almost instinctively to repress their own individuality, can generally triumph over their moods.  Perhaps in their expansive moments they lose a little spontaneity in the process; they are cheerful rather than buoyant, gentle rather than pungent.  But the result is that when the mood shifts into depression, they are still imperturbably courteous and considerate.  A near relation of a great public man, who suffered greatly from mental depression, has told me that some of the most painful minutes he has ever been witness of were, when the great man, after behaving on some occasion of social festivity with an admirable and sustained gaiety, fell for a moment into irreclaimable and hopeless gloom and fatigue, and then again, by a resolute effort, became strenuously considerate and patient in the privacy of the family circle.

Some people achieve the same mastery over mood by an intensity of religious conviction.  But the worst of that particular triumph is that an attitude of chastened religious patience is, not unusually, a rather depressing thing.  It is so restrained, so pious, that it tends to deprive life of natural and unaffected joy.  If it is patient and submissive in affliction, it is also tame and mild in cheerful surroundings.  It issues too frequently in a kind of holy tolerance of youthful ebullience and vivid emotions.  It results in the kind of character that is known as saintly, and is generally accompanied by a strong deficiency in the matter of humour.  Life is regarded as too serious a business to be played with, and the delight in trifles, which is one of the surest signs of healthy energy, becomes ashamed and abashed in its presence.  The atmosphere that it creates is oppressive, remote, ungenial.  “I declare that Uncle John is intolerable, except when there is a death in the family—­and then