Let us admire, lastly, the economy of time in great men who have allowed themselves only four, five, or six hours, for sleep. It may be true that they would have lived longer had they always paid themselves a fair night's quiet for a fair day's work; they would have lived longer, but they would not have lived so fast. It is essential to live fast in this busy world. Moreover, there is a superstitious reverence for early rising, as a virtue by itself, which we shall do well to acquire. Let sanitary men say, “Roost with the lark, if you propose to rise with her.” Nonsense. No civilized man can go to bed much earlier than midnight; but every man of business must be up betimes. Idle, happy people, on the other hand, they to whom life is useless, prudently remain for nine, ten, or a dozen hours in bed. Snug in their corner, they are in the way of nobody, except the housemaid.
“Now wotte we nat, ne can na see
What manir ende that there shall be.”
Birth, sickness, burial. Eating, drinking, clothing, sleeping. Exercise, and social pleasure. Air, water, and light. These are the topics upon which we have already touched. A finished painting of good ægritudinary discipline was not designed upon the present canvas: no man who knows the great extent and varied surface of the scene which such a picture should embrace, will think that there is here even an outline finished.
We might have recommended early marriages; and marriage with first cousins. We might have urged all men with heritable maladies to shun celibacy. We might have praised tobacco, which, by acting on the mucous membrane of the mouth, acts on the same membrane in the stomach also (precisely as disorder of the stomach will communicate disorder to the mouth), and so helps in establishing a civilized digestion and a pallid face.
“But we woll stint of this matere
For it is wondir long to here.”
It is inherent in man to be perverse. A drawing-room critic, in one of Gait's novels, takes up a picture of a cow, holds it inverted, and enjoys it as a castellated mansion with four corner towers. And so, since “all that moveth doth mutation love,” after a like fashion, many people, it appears, have looked upon these papers. There is a story to the point in Lucian. Passus received commission from a connoisseur to draw a horse with his legs upward. He drew it in the usual way. His customer came unannounced, saw what had been done, and grumbled fearfully. Passus, however, turned his picture up-side down, and then the connoisseur was satisfied. These papers have been treated like the horse of Passus.
“Stimatissimo Signor Boswell” says, in his book on Corsica, that he rode out one day on Paoli's charger, gay with gold and scarlet, and surrounded by the chieftain's officers. For a while, he says, he thought he was a hero. Thus, like a goose on horseback, has our present writer visited some few of the chief ægritudinary outposts. Why not so? They say there is no way impossible. Wherefore an old emblem-book has represented Cupid crossing a stream which parts him from an altar, seated at ease upon his quiver, for a boat, and rowing with a pair of arrows. So has the writer floated over on a barrel of his folly, and possibly may touch, O reader, at the Altar of your Household Gods.