Now I would not dream of insulting the understanding of my readers by presuming that they do not know what the simple rules of hygiene which tend to long life, perfect health, and calm happiness, are. There is hardly a sixteen-year-old schoolboy nowadays who has not got these at his finger-ends; but, unfortunately, if we do not act up to them with a regularity that at length becomes a habit, we are apt to let them slip from our mind; and it is so easy to fall off into a poor condition of health, but not so very easy to pull one’s self together again.
Let me simply enumerate, by way of reminding you, some of the ordinary rules for the maintenance of health. We will then see how far it is possible to carry these out in such a radical change of life as that of an amateur gipsy, living, eating, and sleeping in his caravan, and sometimes, to some extent, roughing it.
The following remarks from one of my books on cycling are very much to the point in the subject I am now discussing, and the very fact of my writing so will prove, I think, that I am willing you should hear both sides of the question, for I know there are people in this world who prefer the life of the bluebottle-fly—fast and merry—to what they deem a slow even if healthful existence. (“Health upon Wheels.” Messrs Iliffe and Co, 98 Fleet Street, London.)
Good habits, I say, may be formed as well as bad ones; not so easily, I grant you, but, being formed, or for a time enforced, they, too, become a kind of second nature.
Some remarks of the author of “Elia” keep running through my head as I write, and for the life of me I cannot help penning them, although they in a certain sense militate against my doctrine of reform. “What?” says the gentle author, “have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank.”
I question, however, if Charles Lamb, after so many years spent in the London of his day, had a very great deal of liver left.—If he had, probably it was a very knotty one (cirrhosis) and piebald rather than healthy chocolate brown.
Now I should be sorry indeed if I left my readers to infer that, after a reckless life up to the age say of forty, forty-five, or fifty, a decided reformation of habits will so far rejuvenate a man that he shall become quite as healthy and strong as he might have been had he spent his days in a more rational manner; one cannot have his cake and eat it too, but better late than never; he can by care save the morsel of cake he has left, instead of throwing it to the dogs and going hot foot after it.
Every severe illness, no matter how well we get over it, detracts from our length of days: how much more then must twenty or more years of a fast life do so? With our “horse’s constitution” we may come through it all with life, but it will leave its mark, if not externally, internally.
I am perfectly willing that the reader should have both the cons and the pros of the argument, and will even sit in judgment on the statements I have just made, and will myself call upon witnesses that may seem to disprove them.
The first to take the box is your careless, sceptical, happy-go-lucky man, your live-for-to-day-and-bother-to-morrow individual, who states that he really enjoys life, and that he can point to innumerable acquaintances, who go the pace far faster than he does, but who, nevertheless, enjoy perfect health, and are likely to live “till a fly fells them.”