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was the abode of misery: every man's hand was lifted against his neighbor.

11 That crimes diminish in proportion to the cultivation of knowledge, has been already urged; in addition to the proofs before adduced, "In one of the protestant Cantons of Switzerland, the people were so well instructed that the executioner was called upon to perform his hateful office but once in the long space of twenty years! Such are some of the fruits of knowledge, which ripen into an immediate harvest, and amply repay the cultivator."-Report of the Committee of the "Stockport Sunday School.”—Dr. Pole.

12 Happy are they, who, being disgusted with all violent pleasures, know how to content themselves with the sweets of an innocent life. Happy are they, who are diverted at the same time that they are instructed, and please themselves by enriching their minds with knowledge.

13 Wherever they may be thrown by adverse fortune, they carry their own entertainment with them; and the uneasiness which preys on others, even in the midst of their pleasures is unknown to those who can employ themselves in reading. Happy are they who love books, and are not deprived of them! Telem. book ii.

14 Imagine that we had it in our power to call up the shades of the greatest and wisest men that ever existed, and oblige them to converse with us on the most interesting topics; what an inestimable privilege should we think it! how superior to all common enjoyments! But in a well furnished library, we, in fact, possess this power.

15 We can question Xenophon and Cæsar on their campaigns; make Demosthenes and Cicero plead before us; join in the audiences of Socrates and Plato; and receive demonstrations from Euclid and Newton. In books we have the choicest thoughts of the ablest men, in their best dress. We can, at pleasure, exclude dulness and impertinence; and open our doors to wit and good sense alone.

16 Without books, I have never been able to pass a single day to my entire satisfaction: with them, no day has been so dark as not to have its pleasures. Even pain and sickness have for a time been charmed away by them. By the easy provision of a book in my pocket, I have frequently worn through long nights and days, in the most disagreeable parts of my profession, with all the difference in my feelings between calm content and fretful impatience.-Dr. Aikin's Letters from a Father to a Son.

SECTION II.

Labor and exercise indispensable for health.

Pray for a sound mind in a sound body.-Juvenal.

1 Bodily labor is of two kinds, either that which a man submits to for his livelihood; or that which he undergoes for his pleasure. The latter of them generally changes the name of labor for that of exercise, but differs only from ordinary labor as it rises from another motive. A country life abounds in both these kinds of labor, and for that reason gives a man a greater stock of health, and consequently a more perfect enjoyment of himself, than any other way of life.

2 I consider the body as a system of tubes and glands, or to use a more rustic phrase, a bundle of pipes and strainers, fitted to one another after so wonderful a manner, as to make a proper engine for the soul to work with. This description does not only comprehend the bowels, bones, tendons, veins, nerves, and arteries, but every muscle and every ligature, which is a composition of fibres, that are so many imperceptible tubes or pipes interwoven on all sides with invisible glands or strainers.

3 This general idea of a human body, without considering it in its niceties of anatomy, let us see how absolutely necessary labor is for the right preservation of it. There must be frequent motions and agitations, to mix, digest, and separate the juices contained in it, as well as to clear and cleanse that infinitude of pipes and strainers of which it is composed, and to give their solid parts a more firm and lasting tone. Labor or exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

4 I might here mention the effects which this has upon all the faculties of the mind, by keeping the understanding clear, the imagination untroubled, and refining those spirits that are necessary for the proper exertion of our intellectual faculties, during the present laws of union between soul and body. It is to a neglect in this particular that we must ascribe the spleen, which is so frequent in men of studious and sedentary tempers, as well as the vapors to which those of the other sex are so often subject.

5 Had not exercise been so absolutely necessary for our well being, nature would not have made the body so proper for it, by giving such an activity to the limbs, and such a pli

ancy to every part, as necessarily produce those compres sions, extensions, contortions, dilations, and all other kinds of motions that are necessary for the preservation of such a system of tubes and glands as has been before mentioned.

6 And that we might not want inducements to engage us in such an exercise of the body as is proper for its welfare, it is so ordered, that nothing valuable can be procured without it. Not to mention riches and honor, even food and raiment are not to be come at without the toil of the hands and sweat of the brows.

7 Providence furnishes materials, but expects that we should work them up ourselves. The earth must be labored before it gives its increase, and when it is forced into its several products, how many hands must they pass through before they are fit for use? Manufactures, trade, and agricul ture, naturally employ more than nineteen parts of the speeies in twenty; and as for those who are not obliged to labor, by the condition in which they are born, they are more miserable than the rest of mankind, unless they indulge themselves in that voluntary labor which goes by the name of exercise.

8 There is no kind of exercise which I would so recommend to my readers of both sexes as that of riding, as there is none which so much conduces to health, and is every way accommodated to the body, according to the idea which I have given of it. Dr. Sydenham is very lavish in its praises; and if the English reader will see the mechanical effects of it described at length, he may find them in a book published not many years since, under the title of Medicina Gymnastica.

9 For my own part when I am in town, for want of these opportunities, I exercise myself an hour every morning upon a dumb bell that is placed in a corner of my room, and pleases me the more because it does every thing I require in the most profound silence. My landlady and her daughters are so well acquainted with my hours of exercise, that they never come into my room to disturb me while I am ringing.

10 To conclude, as I am a compound of soul and body, I consider myself as obliged to a double scheme of duties; and think I have not fulfilled the business of the day when I do not thus employ the one in labor and exercise, as well as the other in study and contemplation.

Spectator, No. 115.-Addison.

SECTION III.

Exercise and temperance preserve health and prolong life.

Fools not to know that half exceeds the whole,

How blest the sparing meal and frugal bowl.-Hesiod.

1 There is a story in the Arabian Nights' Tales, of a king who had long languished under an ill habit of body, and had taken abundance of remedies to no purpose. At length, says the fable, a physician cured him by the following method: he took a hollow ball of wood, and filled it with several drugs; after which he closed it up so artificially that nothing appeared. He likewise took a mall, and after having hollowed the handle, and that part which strikes the ball, enclosed in them several drugs after the same manner as in the ball itself.

2 He then ordered the sultan, who was his patient, to exercise himself early in the morning with these rightly prepared instruments, till such time as he should sweat; when, as the story goes, the virtue of the medicaments perspiring through the wood, had so good an influence on the sultan's constitution, that they cured him of an indisposition which all the compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able

to remove.

3 This eastern allegory is finely contrived to show us how beneficial bodily labor is to health, and that exercise is the most effectual physic. I have described in my hundred and fifteenth paper, from the general structure and mechanism of a human body, how absolutely necessary exercise is for its preservation; I shall in this place recommend another great preservative of health, which in many cases produces the same effects as exercise, and may, in some measure, supply its place, where opportunities of exercise are wanting.

4 The preservative I am speaking of is Temperance, which has those particular advantages above all other means of health, that it may be practised by all ranks and conditions, at any season, or in any place. It is a kind of regimen into which every man may put himself without interruption to business, expense of money, or loss of time.

5 If exercise throws off all superfluities, temperance prevents them: if exercise raises proper ferments in the humors, and promotes the circulation of the blood, temperance gives nature her full play, and enables her to exert herself in all her force and vigor: if exercise dissipates a growing distemper, temperance starves it.

6 Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substi

tute of exercise or temperance. Medicines are indeed absolutely necessary in acute distempers; that cannot wait the slow operations of these two great instruments of health: but did men live in a habitual course of exercise and temperance, there would be but little occasion for them. Accord

ingly we find that those parts of the world are the most healthy, where they subsist by the chase; and that men lived longest when their lives were employed in hunting, and when they had little food besides what they caught.

7 Blistering, cupping, bleeding, are seldom of use to any but to the idle and intemperate; as all those inward applications, which are so much in practice among us, are, for the most part, nothing else but expedients to make luxury consistent with health. The apothecary is perpetually employed in countermining the cook and the vintner. It is said of Diogenes, that meeting a young man who was going to a feast, he took him up in the street, and carried him home to his friends, as one who was running into imminent danger, had he not prevented him.

8 What would that philosopher have said, had he been present at the gluttony of a modern meal? Would not he have thought the master of a family mad, and had begged his servant to tie down his hands, had he seen him devour fowl, fish, and flesh; swallow oil and vinegar, wines and spices; throw down salads of twenty different herbs, sauces of a hundred ingredients, confections and fruits of numberless sweets and flavors.

9 What unnatural motions and counter-ferments, must such a medley of intemperance produce in the body! For my part, when I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers, lying in ambuscade among the dishes.

10 Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal, but man, keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon every thing that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry, or a mushroom, can escape him.

11 It is impossible to lay down any determinate rule for temperance, because what is luxury in one may be temperance in another; but there are few that have lived any time' in the world, who are not judges of their own constitutions, so far as to know what kinds and what proportions of food do best agree with them.

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