it, Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris. It has been recognised as beyond doubt inherent in human misery, the desire of seeing others wretched when we are wretched ourselves. If the affliction we grieve under be very heavy, we shall find some consolation, says Addison, in the fellowship of as great sufferers as ourselves, especially if our companions be men of virtue and merit; if, on the other hand, our afflictions are light, we shall be comforted by contrasting them with what others endure. Dr. Thomas Brown has a word of praise for him who, in suffering the common ills of our nature, has suffered them as common ills, not repining at affliction, nor proud of enduring it without a murmur, but feeling only that it is part of a great system which is good, and that his lot is the common lot.

Foremost among the multitude of reflections suggested by a bitter experience to the King of Tartary, in the Arabian Nights, is this one: "How little reason had I to think that no one was so unfortunate as myself!" Quite early in the encounters and misadventures of Don Quixote, that poor belaboured knight has to console himself, bruised and battered as he is, in looking upon this as a misfortune common to knights-errant. Anon he fortifies himself by calling to memory the many stories that are so applicable to what has befallen him, one especially from the Diana of George of Montemayor. Sancho has a proverb pat to the purpose, in his colloquy with the squire of the wood: "If the common saying is true, that there is some comfort in having partners in grief, I may comfort myself with you, who serve as crackbrained a master as my own." How apt are we to recollect, or to try to recollect, exclaims Richardson's Honourable Miss Byron, when we are apprehensive that a case may possibly be our own, all those circumstances of which, while another's (however dear that other might be to us), we had not any clear or adequate idea! Henry Mackenzie tells, in the Introduction to one of his fictions, how often he has wandered away from his own woe, in tracing the tale of another's dejection: "At this moment, every sentence I write, I am but escaping a little further from the presence of sorrow."

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So Churchill, in his epistle to Robert Lloyd, with whom he often stole an hour from grief, and in his social converse found relief; for,

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"The mind, of solitude impatient grown,

Loves any sorrows rather than her own."

One of Lesage's Cheminées de Madrid, in the entretiens so entitled, is of the opinion that "c'est une foible consolation pour les malheureux, que d'avoir des compagnons de leur misère.” But this is voted a crotchet, due to a crooked constitution. If Charles Surface is undone, he'll find half his acquaintance ruined too, quoth Mrs. Candour, "and that, you know, is a consolation." "Doubtless, ma'am," Joseph Surface assents,a very great one." When Dr. Fothergill proved the identity of the putrid sore throat (a form of disease then, 1748, newly imported into England) with the Garrotillo, or "gallows disease," of the Spaniards, and the morbus strangulatorius of the Italian writers, it was a real comfort to those who were alarmed by the appearance of a new disease, to learn that the same malady had visited and quitted other countries in other times; for, as one of his biographers remarks, it adds to the despondency of sickness and the terror of death itself, when the pain and peril seem strange. Mr. Dickens, in the uttermost dejection of sea-sickness* during his first voyage to America, was inexpressibly comforted on hearing that a fellow-passenger whom he had pictured to himself insultingly free from that complaint, was prostrate with it too. "I don't think I ever felt such perfect gratification and gratitude of heart, as I did when I heard from the ship's doctor that he had been obliged to put a large mustard poultice on this very gentleman's

* Undoubtedly, as the writer of an essay on the Misfortunes of our Friends has remarked, nobody can witness certain real though minor misfortunes of life, without a strong propensity to laugh; everybody, for example, considers sea-sickness from an absurd point of view, though it would be hard to say why extreme suffering should be ludicrous because it is not dangerous or protracted. Perhaps the grotesqueness of the surrounding circumstances overpowers our sympathies; but the fact that they are so completely vanquished is accounted by this writer scarcely an amiable trait in human nature.

stomach. I date my recovery from the receipt of that intelligence." There is real and substantial mitigation of all human ills and mortifications, as the moralist contends, in the sight of others as badly off to fall on the ice along with twenty others, is no great matter, unless indeed the physical suffering be severe; to be guillotined as one of fifty, is not nearly so bad as to go all alone; and "to be beaten in a competition along with half a dozen very clever fellows, mitigates your mortification." If, as the same authority suggests, you were the only bald man in the world, or the only lame man, or the only man who had lost several teeth, you would find it much harder to resign your mind to your condition. Butler, in Hudibras, commends such reflections as

"No mean nor trivial solaces

To partners in extreme distress;
Who use to lessen their despairs,
By parting them int' equal shares;
As if the more there were to bear,
They felt the weight the easier;
And every one the gentler hung,

The more he took his turn among."

Να

One assigned reason for the popularity of proverbs is, that we comfort ourselves under a state of things which shames or annoys us by remembering that others have found themselves in exactly the same plight before; and, the shape of a proverb being that of a universal proposition, it seems that, if we can recollect an appropriate proverb, we have the testimony of all mankind that what is happening to us is unavoidable. Nac rara videmus quæ pateris, as Juvenal has it: Casus multis hic cognitus, ac jam Tritus; which has been freely Englished, Your ill's but one of Fortune's common store; it happens every day to thousands more. And as Cowper felt and said of misery, it delights to trace its semblance in another's case. The woeworn Duchess of Malfi knew what she was asking, when she asked Cariola to discourse to her some dismal tragedy. "Oh, 'twill increase your melancholy," objected the other. "Thou art deceived," the Duchess replied: "to hear of greater grief

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423

would lessen mine." In Shakspeare we read that fellowship in woe doth woe assuage, as palmers' chat makes short their pilgrimage. True, he says in another stage of the same poem, that the relief is a relief only, never a cure :

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"It easeth some, though none it ever cured,

To think their dolour others have endured."

Consider the like misfortunes of others, is the counsel of the son of Theseus in Ovid, so shalt thou the better bear thine own: Similes aliorum respice casus, Mitius ista feres. And this sort of fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind to our like-feeling fellows. "I was this morning with poor Lady Kerry, who is much worse in her head than I," writes Swift, in the Journal to Stella (Feb. 1, 1711): "She sends me bottles of her bitter, and we are so fond of one another, because our ailments are the same." As Webster's Duchess of Malfi in her misery is for hearing recounted some dismal tragedy, so Shakspeare's Richard the Second, in his despair, is for sitting on the ground and hearing and telling sad stories of the deaths of kings, how some have been deposed, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, some poisoned by their wives; some sleeping killed; all murdered. Near the end of his own tragedy in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle, this deposed king, himself to be so shortly murdered, muses on the power of thoughts tending to content, as flattering the thinkers

"That they are not the first of Fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars,
Who, sitting in the stocks, refuge their shame,—
That many have, and others must sit there:
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortune on the back
Of such as have before endured the like."

Neque enim fortuna querenda Sola tua est. The King in Love's Labour's Lost is eager to discover other victims to the tender passion he had forsworn, and he finds them: "sweet fellowship in shame;" "One drunkard loves another of the name ;" "Am I the first that has been perjured so ?" Dumain, another of the forsworn four, would that the King, Biron, and Longaville,

were in his own case; for the fellowship would from his forehead wipe a perjured note, since none offend where all alike do dote. Longaville overhears, and tells him his love is far from charity, that in love's grief desires society. Had he been more cynical, he might have adopted the style of Dr. Johnson's Imlac, who declares the invitations by which certain natures allure others to a state which they feel to be wretched, to proceed from the natural malignity of hopeless misery, that seeks relief in new companionship. Sir Thomas Browne, in a closing section of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, calls it a great depravity in our nature, and "surely an affection that somewhat savoureth of hell," to desire the society, or comfort ourselves in the fellowship of others that suffer with us. But as surely, or more surely, would the fine old Religious Mediciner have appreciated, if not applauded, the tender and true lines of Edgar in King Lear, when the outcast, offcast son compares his suffering with that of the outcast, offcast, discrowned, distracted king:

"Where we our betters see bearing our woes,

We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffer, suffers most i' the mind;
Leaving free things and happy shows behind :
But then the mind much suffering doth o'erskip,
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.
How light and portable my pain seems now,

When that which makes me bend makes the king bow!"

What Sir Thomas would have demurred to, or outright denied, in his generous strain of stately rhetoric, is such doctrine as is tersely summarised in the familiar maxim of La Rochefoucauld: "On trouve dans le malheur de son meilleur ami, quelque chose qui ne déplaît pas." In proportion to the heroism of your nature, affirms the noble author of Caxtoniana, you will most devotedly sacrifice yourself to the man who has served you, and may nevertheless most fondly mourn for the misfortunes of the man whom you have had the happiness to serve; but in neither case can you find, in the misfortunes of benefactor or benefited, a something that does