433 



Experience, and the work on Solitude, so deeply imbued with the 

 colouring of his soul. Forced from the solitude he loved, he carried, 

 into the courts to which his reputation called him, in an exhaustible store 

 of bitterness and sadness, which political events supervening brought to 

 greater excess : arrived, at length, gradually at the last term of hypo- 

 chondria* he died beset with pusillanimous fears, worthy of all eulogium 

 and all regret*. 



CCXXXV. If the proportion of the fluids to the solids is too great, 

 this superabundance of the humours, which is constantly in favour of the 

 lymphatic system, gives to the whole body considerable bulk, determined 

 by the developement and repletion of the cellular tissue. The flesh is 

 soft, the countenance pale, the hair fair, the pulse weak, slow, and soft, 

 the forms rounded and without expression, all the vital actions more or 

 less languid, the memory treacherous the attention not continuous. Men 

 of this temperament, to which the ancients gave the name of pituitous, 

 and which we should call lymfihatic,, because it depends really on the ex- 

 cessive developement of this system, have, in general, an insurmountable 

 inclination to sloth, averse like to labours of the mind and body : accord- 

 ingly, we are not to wonder, if we find none of them among Plutarch's 

 Illustrious Men. Little fitted for business, they have never exercised 

 great empire over their fellow-creatures, they have never changed the 

 face of the globe, by their negotiations or their conquests. One of the 

 friends of Cicero, Pomponius Atticus, whose history Cornelius Nepos 

 has left us, conciliating to himself all the factions- which tore the Roman 

 republic to pieces, in the civil wars of Caesar and Pompey may be given 

 as the model of it. Among the moderns, the easy Michel Montaigne, 

 all whose passions were so moderate, who reasoned on every thing, even 

 on feeling, was truly pituitous. But, in him, the predominance of the 

 lymphatic system was not carried so far, but that he joined it to a good 

 deal of nervous susceptibility. In the pituitous, from the excess of wa- 

 tery particles in the fluid which should carry every where heat and life, 

 the circulation goes on slowly, the imagination is weak, the passions 

 languid; and, from this moderation of the desires, spring, on many occa- 

 sions, those virtues of temperament, which, to say it, by the bye, should 

 not supply their possessors with matter of quite so much self-com- 

 placency. 



CCXXXVI. This property by which we are, more or less, sensible 

 to impressions on our organs, weak in the pituitous, almost nothing in 

 athletes, moderate in those of sanguine temperament, rather quick in the 

 billious, constitutes, by excess, nervous temperament; seldom natural 

 or primitive, but commonly acquired, and depending on a sedentary and 

 too inactive life, on habitual indulgence in sensuality, on a morbid action 

 of the brain promoted by reading works of imagination, 8cc. This tem- 

 perament shows itself in the emaciation, in the smallness of the muscles, 

 soft, and, as it were, in an atrophy, in the vivacity of the sensations, in 

 the suddenness and mutability of the determinations and judgments. 

 Nervous women, whose wills are absolute but changeable, with excess of 



* See his Eulogium by Tissot ; it is at the beginning of the last edition of the Treatise 

 on Experience in Medicine. It there appears how deeply he was affected by the French 

 revolution, of which he foresaw, with a sort of prophetic spirit, the disastrous conse- 

 quences to his own country. Author's Note. 



3 I 



