"
We must return to John Barton. Poor John! He never got over his
disappointing journey to London. The deep mortification he then
experienced (with, perhaps, as little selfishness for its cause as
mortification ever had) was of no temporary nature; indeed, few of
his feelings were.
Then came a long period of bodily privation; of daily hunger after
food; and though he tried to persuade himself he could bear want
himself with stoical indifference, and did care about it as little
as most men, yet the body took its revenge for its uneasy feelings.
The mind became soured and morose, and lost much of its equipoise.
It was no longer elastic, as in the days of youth, or in times of
comparative happiness; it ceased to hope. And it is hard to live on
when one can no longer hope.
The same state of feeling which John Barton entertained, if
belonging to one who had had leisure to think of such things, and
physicians to give names to them, would have been called monomania;
so haunting, so incessant, were the thoughts that pressed upon him.
I have somewhere read a forcibly described punishment among the
Italians, worthy of a Borgia.
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