with the accompaniment of stewed Normandy pippins.  You may have been wont to spend your days in a fever of business, in a breathless hurry and worry of engagements to be met and matters to be seen to; but after a week under the Water Cure, you will find yourself stretched listlessly upon grassy banks in the summer noon, or sauntering all day beneath the horse-chestnuts of Sudbrook, with a mind as free from business cares as if you were numbered among Tennyson’s lotos-eaters, or the denizens of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence.  And with God’s blessing upon the pure element He has given us in such abundance, you will shortly (testibus Mr. Lane and Sir E. B. Lytton) experience other changes as complete, and more agreeable.  You will find that the appetite which no dainty could tempt, now discovers in the simplest fare a relish unknown since childhood.  You will find the broken rest and the troubled dreams which for years have made the midnight watches terrible, exchanged for the long refreshful sleep that makes one mouthful of the night.  You will find the gloom and depression and anxiety which were growing your habitual temper, succeeded by a lightness of heart and buoyancy of spirit which you cannot account for, but which you thankfully enjoy.  We doubt not that some of our readers, filled with terrible ideas as to the violent and perilous nature of the Water Cure, will give us credit for some strength of mind when we tell them that we have proved for ourselves the entire mode of life; we can assure them that there is nothing so very dreadful about it; and we trust they may not smile at us as harmlessly monomaniacal when we say that, without going the lengths its out-and-out advocates do, we believe that in certain states of health much benefit may really be derived from the system, Sir E. B. Lytton’s eloquent Confessions of a Water-Patient have been before the public for some years.  The Hints to the Sick, the Lame, and the Lazy, give us an account of the ailments and recovery of an old military officer, who, after suffering severety from gout, was quite set up by a few weeks at a hydropathic establishment at Marienberg on the Rhine; and who, by occasional recurrence to the same remedy, is kept in such a state of preservation that, though advanced in years, he ’is able to go eight miles within two hours, and can go up hill with most young fellows.’  The old gentleman’s book, with its odd woodcuts, and a certain freshness and incorrectness of style—­we speak grammatically—­in keeping with the character of an old soldier, is readable enough.  Mr. Lane’s books are far from being well written; the Spirits and Water, especially, is extremely poor stuff.  The Month at Malvern is disfigured by similar faults of style; but Mr. Lane has really something to tell us in that work:  and there is a good deal of interest at once in knowing how a man who had been reduced to the last degree of debility of body and mind, was so effectually restored, that now for years he has, on occasion, proved himself equal to a forty-miles’ walk among the Welsh mountains on a warm summer day; and also in remarking the boyish exhilaration of spirits in which Mr. Lane writes, which he tells us is quite a characteristic result of ‘initiation into the excitements of the Water Cure.’