But it was long before the Secretary could rouse himself from his grief, and in June his aunt, Lady Russell, found it necessary to give him a characteristic exhortation:—
"If you be so without comfort of worldly delight as you seem, it is most ill to the health of your both body and soul; I speak by experience, and know too well that to be true which I say; and, therefore, both am sorry to hear it, and beseech the God of all consolation and comfort to remedy it, with giving you a contrary mind. Else will you find the Daemonius meridianus to creep so far into your heart, with his variety of virtues, seeming good to be yielded to (melancholy I mean) as in the end will shorten life by cumbrous conceits and sickness: and when it is rooted so as with peevish persuasions of good thereby and solitary ejaculations, it will bring forth the fruit of stupidity, forgetfulness of your natural disposition of sweet and apt speeches, fit for your place: and instead thereof breed and make you a surly, sharp, sour plum, no better than in truth a very melancholy mole and a misanthropos hateful to God and man; and only with persuasions seeming holy, wise and good."[2]
Although Cecil had been transacting the