3. Gout. Not a jot; your rhetoric and your politeness are thrown away; your apology avails nothing. If your situation in life is a sedentary one, your amusements, your recreations, at least, should be active. You ought to walk or ride; or if the weather prevents that, play at something.
But let us examine your course of life. While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast, by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast: four dishes of tea, with cream, one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef; which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.
4. Immediately afterward, you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise. But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say, to your sedentary condition; but what is your practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours.
5. This is your perpetual recreation; the least eligible[568] of any for a sedentary man, because, instead of accelerating[569] the motion of the fluids, the rigid[570] attention it requires helps to retard the circulation and obstruct internal secretions.[571] Wrapt in the speculations of this wretched game, you destroy your constitution. What can be expected from such a course of living but a body replete with stagnant humors, ready to fall a prey to all kinds of dangerous maladies,[572] if I, the Gout, did not occasionally bring you relief by agitating those humors, and so purifying or dissipating them? Fie, then, Mr. Franklin! But, amidst my instructions, I had almost forgotten to administer my wholesome corrections; so take that twinge, and that.
6. Franklin. Oh! Eh! Oh! Oh! As much instruction as you please, Madam Gout, and as many reproaches; but pray, Madam, a truce with your corrections!
Gout. No, sir, no; I will not abate a particle of what is so much for your good, therefore—
Franklin. Oh! Eh! It is not fair to say I take no exercise, when I do, very often, go out to dine, and return in my carriage.
7. Gout. That, of all imaginable exercises, is the most slight and insignificant, if you allude to the motion of a carriage suspended on springs. By observing the degree of heat obtained from different kinds of motion, we may form an estimate of the quantity of exercise given by each. Thus, for example, if you turn out to walk in winter with cold feet, in an hour’s time you will be in a glow all over; ride on horseback, the same effect will scarcely be perceived by four hours’ round trotting; but if you loll in a carriage, such as you have mentioned, you may travel all day, and gladly enter the last inn to warm your feet by a fire.
8. Flatter yourself, then, no longer, that half an hour’s airing in your carriage deserves the name of exercise. Providence has appointed few to roll in carriages, while he has given to all a pair of legs, which are machines infinitely more commodious and serviceable. Be grateful, then, and make a proper use of yours.
[563] Inˊ-do-lence, sloth, idleness.