Contagion and Quarantine.

Date:
[1822]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contagion and Quarantine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    1/32 (page 524)
    7 v 524 * ww-^Lord Byron’s Dramas. him to temptations, and to try him by suffering, our reason may conjecture, but our faith is uninformed; and it is a fact which may be advantageously recolle4u?u by those who, insult Christianity, that 'ffle -difficult^jjtrplain belong not to Christianity ajcreed which admits the responsibility and goodness of dais Maker. But though Christianity does not tell us the causjf<of om* cala^ mities, she has not failed to point out their cure; if fostering those amiable affections which enable us to bear our o^^cfrrow^dbest w hile they most dispose us to alleviate the sorrows of Others, and in holding out to us a clearer and brighter prospect of that life where Love shall reap his harvest of enjoyment, and where the happy and benevolent inhabitant of a better world shall neither feel nor witness affliction ! There are some inaccuracies in 1 Cain’ which we forgot to notice in their proper places, and of which one only is, perhaps, w'orth noticing. Cain is made, in p. 3,55, ignorant of the nature of death. He supposes death to be a being, and asks if he cannot wrestle with him ? The same ignorance is expressed in p. 376, and in several other passages. Yet he elsewhere speaks familiarly of the victims whose blood his brother offered on Jehovah’s altar, and whose slaughter must have pretty tolerably explained to him what was meant by the extinction of animal life. There is also a note filled with furious and, as it appears, un- provoked personalities against Mr. Southey, of which we shall say nothing, since for a man of genius and a nobleman to have pub- lished such a diatribe, evinces a state of irritability with which expostulation would be vain, and of which reprobation is needless. This only we will say, that a writer so sensible to every attack, and so suspicious of every allusion, will do well, for his own peace of mind, if not from a better motive, to abstain from compositions of which the only effect can be to offend the honest prejudices, and unsettle the most estimable principles of the great uuyority of that nation who w'ould gladly find a blameless delight in his volumes, and express a patriotic pride in his renown. Art. XI.— 1. Researches into the Lazos and Phenomena of Pesti- lence ; including a Medical Sketch and Review of the Plague of London in 1665, and Remarks on Quarantine, fyc. By Thomas Hancock, M.D., &c. &c. 1821. 2. A Treatise on the Plague, designed to prove it contagious from Facts collected during the Author s Residence in Malta when visited by that Malady in 1813,’ with Observations on its