Page:All the Year Round - Series 1 - Volume 9.djvu/337

Charles Dickens.] AN OLD FOE WITH A NEW NAME, [May 30, 1863.] 329 old-fashioned Christmas weather, when you can step out of a sultry dining-room into a world of Polar ice and snow. Coryzas delight in abrupt contrasts. They prefer a careless to a careful costume. If you seek them lightly clad, with uncovered head, open shirt-collar, and unbuttoned waistcoat, they will meet you half way.

You are notorious for the narrowness of your understanding—I mean for the smallness of your feet. Incase them, by all means, to show them off, with fine cotton stockings, in the tightest of boots with the thinnest of soles. Walk in them, through a sloppy thaw, from St. James's Park to Primrose-hill and back, and you may possibly bring home with you a very fair and promising coryza. Or, you are a boat-racer, pulling as no man of Cambridge or Oxford ever pulled before. After a longer pull than usual, retire to a meadow to refresh your blood. Lie down beneath a tree, stretching your stalwart length on the grass. Take particular care to go to sleep. When you wake, it will not be your fault if you have not a strong coryza. Once, on a hot summer's day, I climbed the Apennine on foot, starting from the Bologna side. On reaching the summit, I mounted the box of a carriage, to enjoy the more extensive view and admit the refreshing breeze to my open chest. I saw no coryza on the mountain-top; the thought of coryzas never entered my head. Nevertheless, I carried into Florence as charming a coryza as you would wish to have.

The presence of a coryza, when caught, is frequently betrayed by a convulsive cry or exclamation which no amount of self-restraint can suppress. When you hear repeated sounds resembling "Chishoh! chishoh!" be sure that a coryza is not far off. "Itch-ho!" is another orthographical mode of expressing the same thing. A Muscovite variety of the species modifies the above syllables into "Tchischoff! Tchischoff!" A Polish nobleman, who was never without a good coryza, was thence surnamed the Count Tchischoffinski, which made his wife the Countess Tchischoffinska. The cry may be mechanically imitated by introducing to the human nostril finely ground pepper, comminuted tobacco-leaves, or any other pulverulent stimulus. Some nostrils, however, have become so indurated and coriaceous—in trivial language, leathery—that no amount of powdery excitement is able to startle them from their propriety. They bid defiance to dusty provocation, Still the insensible proboscis may be made to give galvanic signs of life, if its proprietor will only throw back his head and look at the sun fixedly.

As the cuckoo is named after its cry, in all nations and languages, so by a pleasing onomatopeia, in certain nurseries, coryzas are known by the sound they elicit. Biddy says to little Tom, "Oh! Master Tommy, you have caught a chisho." To which accusation Tommy replies, "Chisho! Yes, I have,” or, "Chisho! No, I haven't," according to his habits of truth or un-truth. The oldest inhabitant of Drafton Attics states that, in his young days, coryzas were called "the sneezums," and that it was customary to exorcise the enemy thus made manifest, by a counter exclamation, viz. "God bless you!"

Coryzas have also a habit of imitating, and at the same time corrupting, human speech. They delight in abusing the etymological doctrine of the convertibility of certain letters. B. they make do duty for M. Biddy, under the influence of chisho, would say, "Oh, Tobby! Naughty Tobby! You bustn't bake bouths at your Babba!" A French savant, M. Edmond About, in his wonderful romance of The Nose of a Notary, publishes the discovery that coryzas speak pure Auvergnat—i.e. the patois of the province of Auvergne. In Great Britain, the coryza dialect has been held to bear a relationship to the modern Jewish. At the same time with the vitiation of speech, coryza's taste is vitiated. It cannot tell the difference between plum-pudding and toasted cheese. It takes roast pork for boiled veal, and curried fowl for harricoed mutton. By sight only can it differentiate fish from flesh, and flesh from fowl. The same of smells; it is equally insensible to the perfume of the rose and the odour of over-kept venison.

The reader has by this time guessed that what the Grecian gods call coryza, and humble men "a cold in the head," is no other than the Rhinitis of nosologists, the Rheum of our ancestors, the Nasal Catarrh of apothecaries, and the Gravedo of Latin authors. The very names by which it has been currently known—pose, mur, stuffing of the head, distillation into the eyes and nose, all producing unusual stolidity and heaviness in the bewildered patient—mark it as helplessly ridiculous and pitiable. The doctor despises it, as bringing neither glory nor profit to him, but as only increasing the figures which stand before "handkerchiefs" in the washer-woman's bill. Complain to your medical man of a cold in the head, and what comfort will he give you? Pooh! It is a trifle. It is a common, temporary indisposition, of no importance in the world, except as a subject for jokes, to be cauterised with a caricature, or blistered with an epigram. Men are wicked enough to laugh at anything. Tie a tin kettle to a poor dog's tail, and you will see every individual passenger highly amused at the animal's fright; forgetting that he may go mad and give them a serious fright in turn. But imagine the position of the man who has to make a declaration of love, or his maiden speech in the House of Commons, or his first pleading at the bar, with his nasal appendage—I shudder to write it—"stuffed up" with a horrid coryza. Fancy the sufferings of the Japanese, with their pockets full of smooth paper wipers only; fancy the awful destitution of those to whom fortune refuses a kerchief of any kind!

You may get the master of a cramp, you may bear a toothache or have your tooth out, you may conquer a twinge of threatened gout, you may subdue your anger and other evil passions; but a well-established cold in the head, resisting your utmost efforts, makes you half stupid in spite of