The illness with which he’d been smitten
should have been analyzed when caught,
something like spleen, that scourge of Britain,
or Russia’s chondria, for short.

These lines wryly diagnose a fashionable, hard-to-name malaise—less a medical condition than a cultural pose. By invoking “spleen” (a stereotypically English melancholy) and “chondria” (short for hypochondria, framed as a Russian equivalent), the speaker treats the character’s suffering as a symptom of his era’s cultivated boredom and self-absorption. The mock-clinical tone (“should have been analyzed when caught”) satirizes the tendency of educated society to aestheticize discontent, turning moral and spiritual emptiness into a chic ailment with a foreign label. The passage thus sets up a critique of cosmopolitan imitation and the romanticization of ennui.