Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

Civilized people can not endure being much wetted. Contact of water, during exercise, will do no harm to healthy bodies, but will spoil good clothes. We will get damp only when we walk out in bad weather; then, when we come home, we need no change. Evaporation from damp clothes—the act of drying—while the body cools down, resting, and perhaps fatigued, that is what damages the health; against that we have no objection.

Hem! No doubt it is taking a great liberty with a Briton to look over his wardrobe. I will not trespass so far, but, my dear sir, your Hat! If we are to have a column on our heads, let it be one in which we can feel pride; a miniature monument; and we might put a statue on the top. Hats, as they are now worn, would not fitly support more than a bust. Is not this mean? On ægritudinary grounds we will uphold a hat. To keep the edifice from taking flight before a puff of wind, it must be fitted pretty tightly round the head, must press over the forehead and the occiput. How much it presses, a red ring upon our flesh will often testify. Heads are not made of putty; pressure implies impediment to certain processes within; one of these processes is called the circulation of the blood. The brain lies underneath our hats. Well, that is as it should be. Ladies do not wear hats, and never will, the bonnet is so artful a contrivance for encompassing the face with ornament; roses and lilies and daffidowndillies, which would have sent Flora into fits, and killed her long ago, had such a goddess ever been.

I said that there was brain under the hat; this is not always obvious, but there is generally hair. Once upon a time, not very long ago, hair was constructed with great labor into a huge tower upon every lady’s head, pomatum being used by way of mortar, and this tower was repaired every three weeks. The British matron then looked like a “mop-headed Papuan.” The two were much alike, except in this, that while our countrywoman triumphed in her art, the Papuan was discontented with his nature. The ladies here, whose hair was naturally made to fall around the shoulders, reared it up on end; but in New Guinea, fashionables born with hair that grew of its own will into an upright bush, preferred to cut it off, and re-arrange it in a wig directed downwards. Sometimes they do no more than crop it close; and then, since it is characteristic of the hair in this race to grow, not in an expanse, but in tufts, the head is said by sailors to remind them of a worn-out shoe-brush. So, at the Antipodes as well as here, Art is an enemy to Nature. Hair upon the head was meant originally to preserve in all seasons an equable temperature above the brain. Emptying grease-pots into it, and matting it together, we convert it into an unwholesome skull-cap.

The neck? Here sanitary people say, How satisfactory it is that Englishmen keep their necks covered with a close cravat, and do not Byronize in opposition to the climate. That is very good; but English women, who account themselves more delicate, don’t cover their necks, indeed they do not at all times cover their shoulders. So traveling from top to toe, if Englishmen wear thick shoes to protect the feet, our English women scorn the weakness, and go, except a little fancy covering, bare-footed.

From this point I digress, to note of other garments that the English dress, as now established, does on the whole fair credit to society. To the good gentlemen who poetize concerning grace and the antique, who sigh for togas, stolas, and paludaments, I say, Go to. The drapery you sigh for was the baby-linen of the human race. Now we are out of long-clothes. The present European dress is that which offers least impediment to action. It shows what a Man is like, and that is more than any stranger from another world could have detected under the upholstery to which our sculptors cling. The merest hint of a man—shaped as God shaped him—is better than ten miles of folded blanket. Artists cry down our costume; forgetting that if they have not folds of drapery to paint, that is because they have in each man every limb to which they may assign its posture. If they can put no mind into a statue by the mastery of attitude, all the sheets in Guy’s Hospital will not twist into a fold that shall be worth their chiseling.

With women it is different. They have both moral and æsthetic right to drapery; and for the fashion of it, we must leave that to themselves. They are all licensed to deal in stuffs, colors, frippery, and flounce. And to wear rings in their ears. If ladies have good taste they can not vex us; and that any of them can have bad taste, who shall hint? Their stays they will abide by, as they love hysterics; them I have mentioned. I have before also gone out of my way to speak of certain humps carried by women on their backs, which are not healthy or unhealthy—who shall say what they are? Are these humps allegorical? Our wives and daughters perhaps wish to hint that they resemble camels in their patience; camels who bear their burden through a desert world, which we, poor folk, should find it quite impossible to travel through without them.

X. Fresh Air.

Philosophers tell us that the breath of man is poisonous; that when collected in a jar it will kill mice, but when accumulated in a room it will kill men. Of this there are a thousand and one tales. I decline alluding to the Black Hole of Calcutta, but will take a specimen dug up by some sanitary gardener from Horace Walpole’s letters. In 1742 a set of jolly Dogberries, virtuous in their cups, resolved that every woman out after dark ought to be locked up in the round-house. They captured twenty-six unfortunates, and shut them in with doors and windows fastened. The prisoners exhausted breath in screaming. One poor girl said she was worth eighteenpence, and cried that she would give it gladly for a cup of water. Dogberry was deaf. In the morning four were brought out dead, two dying, and twelve in a dangerous condition. This is an argument in favor of the new police. I don’t believe in ventilation; and will undertake here, in a few paragraphs, to prove it nonsense.

At the very outset, let us take the ventilation-mongers on their own ground. People of this class are always referring us to nature. Very well, we will be natural. Do you believe, sir, that the words of that dear lady, when she said she loved you everlastingly, were poisonous air rendered sonorous by the action of a larynx, tongue, teeth, palate, and lips? No, indeed; ladies, at any rate, although they claim a double share of what the cherubs want—and, possibly, these humps, now three times spoken of, are the concealed and missing portions of the cherubim torn from them by the fair sex in some ancient struggle. There, now, I am again shipwrecked on the wondrous mountains. I was about to say, that ladies, who, in some things, surpass the cherubs, equal them in others; like them, are vocal with ethereal tones; their breath is “the sweet south, stealing across a bed of violets,” and that’s not poisonous, I fancy. Well, I believe the chemists have, as yet, not detected any difference between a man’s breath, and a woman’s; therefore, neither of them can be hurtful. But let us grant the whole position. Breath is poisonous, but nature made it so; nature intended it to be so. Nature made man a social animal, and, therefore, designed that many breaths should be commingled. Why do you, lovers of the natural, object to that arrangement?

Now let us glance at the means adopted to get rid of this our breath, this breath of which our words are made, libeled as poisonous. Ventilation is of two kinds, mechanical and physical. I will say something about each.

Mechanical ventilation is that which machinery produces. One of the first recorded ventilators of this kind, was not much more extravagant in its charges upon house-room, than some of which we hear in 1850. In 1663, H. Schmitz published the scheme of a great fanner, which, descending through the ceiling, moved to and fro pendulum-wise, within a mighty slit. The movement of the fanner was established by a piece of clockwork more simple than compact: it occupied a complete chamber overhead, and was set in noisy motion by a heavy weight. The weight ran slowly down, pulling its rope until it reached the parlor floor; so that a gentleman incautiously falling asleep under it after his dinner, might awake to find himself a pancake. Since that time we have had no lack of ingenuity at work on forcing pumps, and sucking-pumps, and screws. The screws are admirable, on account of the unusually startling nature, now and then, of their results. Not long ago, a couple of fine screws were adapted to a public building; one was to take air out, the other was to turn air in. The first screw, unexpectedly perverse, wheeled its air inward; so did the second, but instead of directing its draught upward, it blew down with a great gust of contempt upon the horrified experimentalist. There is something of a screw principle in those queer little wheels fastened occasionally in our windows, and on footmen’s hats—query, are those the ventilating hats?—the rooms are as much ventilated by these little tins as they would be by an air from “Don Giovanni.” I will say nothing about pumps; nor, indeed, need we devote more space to mechanical contrivances, since it is from other modes of ventilation that our cause has most to fear. Only one quaint speculation may be mentioned. It is quite certain that in the heats of India, air is not cooled by fanning, nor is it cooled judiciously by damping it. Professor Piazzi Smyth last year suggested this idea: Compress air by a forcing-pump into a close vessel, by so doing you increase its heat, then suddenly allow it to escape into a room, it will expand so much as to be cold, and, mixing with the other air in the apartment, cool the whole mass. This is the last new theory, which has not yet, I think, been tried in practice.

Now, physical ventilation—that which affects to imitate the processes of nature—is a more dangerously specious business. Its chief agent is heat. In nature, it is said, the sun is Lord High Ventilator. He rarefies the air in one place by his heat, elsewhere permits cold, and lets the air be dense; the thin air rises, and the dense air rushes to supply its place; so we have endless winds and currents—nature’s ventilating works. It is incredible that sane men should have thought this system fit for imitation. It is a failure. Look at the hot department, where a traveler sometimes has to record that he lay gasping for two hours upon his back, until some one could find some water for him somewhere. Let us call that Africa, and who can say that he enjoys the squalls of wind rushing toward the desert? Let us think of the Persian and the Punic wars, when fleets which had not learned to play bo-peep with ventilating processes, strewed Mediterranean sands with wrecks and corpses. Some day we shall have these mimics of Dame Nature content with nothing smaller than a drawing-room typhoon to carry off the foul air of an evening party; dowagers’ caps, young ladies’ scarfs, cards, pocket-handkerchiefs, will whirl upon their blast, and then they will be happy. Now their demands are modest, but they mean hurricanes rely upon it; we must not let ourselves be lulled into a false security.

A fire, they say, is in English houses necessary during a large part of the year, is constant during that season when we are most closely shut up in our rooms. The fire, they say, is our most handy and most efficacious ventilator. Oh, yes, we know something about that: we know too well that the fire makes an ascending current, and that the cold air rushes from our doors and windows to the chimney, as from surrounding countries to the burning desert. We know that very well, because every such current is a draught; one cuts into our legs, one gnaws about our necks, and all our backs are cold. We are in the condition of a pious man in Fox’s “Martyrs,” about whom I used to read with childish reverence: that after a great deal of frying, during which he had not been turned by the Inquisition-Soyer, he lifted up his voice in verse:

“This side enough is toasted;
Then turn me, tyrant, and eat,
And see whether raw or roasted
I make the better meat.”

We, all of us, over our Christmas fires, present this choice of raw or roast, and we don’t thank your principles of ventilation for it. Then say these pertinacious people, that they also disapprove of draughts; but they don’t seem to mind boring holes in a gentleman’s floor, or knocking through the sacred walls of home. This is their plan. They say, that you should have, if possible, a pipe connected with the air without, passing behind the cheeks of your stove, and opening under your fire, about, on, or close before your hearth. They say, that from this source the fire will be supplied so well, that it will no longer suck in draughts over your shoulders, and between your legs, from remote corners of the room. They say, moreover, that if this aperture be large enough, it will supply all the fresh air needed in your room, to replace that which has ascended and passed out, through a hole which you are to make in your chimney near the ceiling. They say, that an up-draught will clear this air away so quietly that you will not need even a valve; though you may have one fitted and made ornamental at a trifling cost. They would recommend you to make another hole in the wall opposite your chimney, near the ceiling also, to establish a more effectual current in the upper air. Then, they say, you will have a fresh air, and no draughts. Fresh air, yes, at the expense of a hole in the floor, and two holes in the wall. We might get fresh air, gentlemen, on a much larger scale by pulling the house down. They say, you should not mind the holes. Windows are not architectural beauties, yet we like them for admitting light; and some day it may strike us that the want of ventilators is a neighbor folly to the want of windows.

This they suggest as the best method of adapting our old houses to their new ideas. New houses they would have so built as to include this system of ventilation in their first construction, and so include it as to make it more effectual. But really, if people want to know how to build what are called well-ventilated houses, they must not expect me to tell them; let them buy Mr. Hosking’s book on “The proper Regulation of Buildings in Towns.”

Up to this date, as I am glad to know, few architects have heard of ventilation. Under church galleries we doze through the most lively sermons, in public meetings we pant after air, but we have architecture; perhaps an airy style sometimes attempts to comfort us. These circumstances are, possibly, unpleasant at the time, but they assist the cause of general unhealthiness. Long may our architects believe that human lungs are instruments of brass; and let us hope that, when they get a ventilating fit, they will prefer strange machines, pumping, screwing, steaming apparatus. May they dispense then, doctored air, in draughts and mixtures.(4)

Fresh air in certain favored places—as in Smithfield, for example—is undoubtedly an object of desire. It is exceedingly to be regretted, if the rumors be correct, that the result of a Commission of Inquiry threatens, by removing Smithfield, to destroy the only sound lung this metropolis possesses. The wholesome nature of the smell of cows is quite notorious. Humboldt tells of a sailor who was dying of fever in the close hold of a ship. His end being in sight, some comrades brought him out to die. What Humboldt calls “the fresh air” fell upon him, and, instead of dying, he revived, eventually getting well. I have no doubt that there was a cow on board, and the man smelt her. Now, if so great an effect was produced by the proximity of one cow, how great must be the advantage to the sick in London of a central crowded cattle-market!

XI. Exercise.

There is a little tell-tale muscle in the inner corner of the eye, which, if you question it, will deliver a report into your looking-glass touching the state of the whole muscular system which lies elsewhere hidden in your body. When it is pale, it praises you. Muscular development is, by all means, to be kept down. Some means of holding it in check we have already dwelt upon. Muscular power, like all other power, will increase with exercise. We desire to hold the flesh in strict subjection to the spirit. Bodily exercise, therefore, must be added to the number of those forces which, by strengthening the animal, do damage to the spiritual man.

We must take great pains to choke the energy of children. Their active little limbs must be tied down by a well-woven system of politeness. They run, they jump, turn heels over head, they climb up trees, if they attempt stillness they are ever on the move, because nature demands that while the body grows, it shall be freely worked in all its parts, in order that it may develop into a frame-work vigorous and well proportioned. Nature really is more obstinate than usual on this point. So restless a delight in bodily exertion is implanted in the child, that our patience is considerably tried when we attempt to keep it still. Children, however, can be tamed and civilized. By sending them unhealthy from the nursery, we can deliver many of them spiritless at school, there to be properly subdued. The most unwholesome plan is to send boys to one school, girls to another; both physically and morally, this method gives good hope of sickliness. Nature, who never is on our side, will allow children of each sex to be born into one family, to play together, and be educated at one mother’s knee. There ought to be—if nature had the slightest sense of decency—girls only born in one house, boys only in another. However, we can sort the children at an early age, and send them off to school—girls east, boys west.

A girl should be allowed, on no account, to climb a tree, or be unladylike. She shall regard a boy as a strange, curious monster; be forced into flirtation; and prefer the solace of a darling friend to any thing that verges on a scamper. She shall learn English grammar: that is to mean, Lindley Murray’s notion of it; geography, or the names of capital towns, rivers, and mountain ranges; French enough for a lady; music, ornamental needlework, and the “use of the globes.” By-the-by, what a marvel it is that every lady has learned in her girlhood the use of the globes, and yet you never see a lady using them. All these subjects she shall study from a female point of view. Her greatest bodily fatigue shall be the learning of a polka, or the Indian sceptre exercise. Now and then, she shall have an iron down her back, and put her feet in stocks. The young lady shall return from school, able to cover ottomans with worsted birds; and to stitch a purse for the expected lover about whom she has been thinking for the last five years. She is quite aware that St. Petersburg is the capital of Ireland, and that a noun is a verb-substantive, which signifies to be, to do, to suffer.

The boy children shall be sent to school, where they may sit during three hours consecutively, and during eight or nine hours in the day, forcing their bodies to be tranquil. They shall entertain their minds by stuttering the eloquence of Cicero, which would be dull work to them in English, and is not enlivened by the Latin. They shall get much into their mouths of what they can not comprehend, and little or nothing into their hearts, out of the wide stores of information for which children really thirst. They shall be taught little or nothing of the world they live in, and shall know its Maker only as an answer to some question in a catechism. They shall talk of girls as beings of another nature; and shall come home from their school-life, pale, subdued, having unwholesome thoughts, awkward in using limbs, which they have not been suffered freely to develop; and shamefaced in the society from which, during their schoolboy life, they have been banished.

The older girl shall ape the lady, and the older boy shall ape the gentleman; so we may speak next of adults.

No lady ought to walk when she can ride. The carriages of many kinds which throng our streets, all prove us civilized; prove us, and make us weak. The lady should be tired after a four-mile walk; her walk ought to be, in the utmost possible degree, weeded of energy. It should be slow; and when her legs are moved, her arms must be restrained from that synchronous movement which perverse Nature calls upon them to perform. Ladies do well to walk out with their arms quite still, and with their hands folded before them. Thus they prevent their delicacy from being preyed upon by a too wholesome exercise, and, what is to us more pleasant, they betray their great humility. They dare only to walk among us lords of the creation with their arms folded before them, that by such humble guise they may acknowledge the inferiority of their position. An Australian native, visiting London, might almost be tempted, in sheer pride of heart, to knock some of our ladies two or three times about the head with that small instrument which he employs for such correction of his women, that so he might derive the more enjoyment from their manifest submissiveness.

The well-bred gentleman ought to be weary after six miles of walking, and haughtily stare down the man who talks about sixteen. The saddle, the gig, the carriage, or the cab, and omnibus, must protect at once his delicacy and his shoes. The student should confine himself to study, grudging time; believing nobody who tells him that the time he gives to wholesome exercise, he may receive back in the shape of increased value for his hours of thought—that even his life of study may be lengthened by it. Let the tradesman be well-rooted in his shop if he desire to flourish. Let the mechanic sit at labor on the week-days, and on Sundays let him sit at church, or else stop decently at home. Let us have no Sunday recreations. It is quite shocking to hear sanitary people lecture on this topic. Profanely they profess to wonder why the weary, toiling family of Christians should not be carried from the town, and from that hum of society which is not to them very refreshing on the day of rest. Why they should not go out and wander in the woods, and ask their hearts who taught the dragon-fly his dancing; who made the blue-bells cluster lovingly together, looking so modest; and ask from whose Opera the birds are singing their delicious music? Why should not the rugged man’s face soften, and the care-worn woman’s face be melted into tenderness, and man and wife and children cluster as closely as the blue-bells in the peaceful wood? What if they there become so very conscious of their mutual love, and of the love of God, as to feel glad that they are not in any other “place of worship,” where they may hear Roman Catholics denounced, or Churchmen scorned, or the Dissenters pounded? What if they then come home refreshed in mind and body, and begin the week with larger, gentler thoughts of God and man? By such means may they not easily be led, if they were at any unwilling, to give praise to God, and learn to join—not as a superstitious rite, but as a humble duty—in His public worship? So talk the sanitary men—here, as in all their doctrines, showing themselves little better than materialists. The negro notion of a Sabbath is, that nobody may fish: our notion is, that nobody may stay away from church.

In these remarks on exercise among adults, I have confined myself to the plain exercise of walking. It may be taken for granted that no grown-up person will be so childish as to leap, to row, to swim. A few Young Englanders may put on, now and then, their white kid gloves to patronize a cricket-match; but we can laugh at them. In a gentleman it is undignified to run; and even walking, at the best, is vulgar.

Indeed there is an obvious vulgarity in the whole doctrine which would call upon us to assist our brute development by the mere exercising of ourselves as animals. Such counsel offers to degrade us to the low position of the race-horse who is trotted to and fro, the poodle who is sent out for an airing. As spiritual people, we look down with much contempt upon the man who would in any thing compare us with the lower animals. His mind is mean, and must be quite beneath our indignation. I will say no more. Why thrash a pickpocket with thunder?

XII. A Bedroom Paper.

If you wish to have a thoroughly unhealthy bedroom, these are the precautions you should take.

Fasten a chimney-board against the fireplace, so as to prevent foul air from escaping in the night. You will, of course, have no hole through the wall into the chimney; and no sane man, in the night season, would have a door or window open. Use no perforated zinc in paneling; especially avoid it in small bedrooms. So you will get a room full of bad air. But in the same room there is bad, worse, and worst: your object is to have the worst air possible. Suffocating machines are made by every upholsterer; attach one to your bed; it is an apparatus of poles, rings, and curtains. By drawing your curtains around you before you sleep, you insure to yourself a condensed body of foul air over your person. This poison vapor-bath you will find to be most efficient when it is made of any thick material.

There being transpiration through the skin, it would not be a bad idea to see whether this can not be in some way hindered. The popular method will do very well: smother the flesh as much as possible in feathers. A wandering princess, in some fairy tale, came to a king’s house. The king’s wife, with the curiosity and acuteness proper to her sex, desired to know whether their guest was truly born a princess, and discovered how to solve the question. She put three peas on the young lady’s paillasse, and over them a large feather-bed, and then another, then another—in fact, fifteen feather-beds. Next morning the princess looked pale, and, in answer to inquiries how she had passed the night, said that she had been unable to sleep at all, because the bed had lumps in it. The king’s wife knew then that their guest showed her good breeding. Take this high-born lady for a model. The feathers retain all heat about your body, and stifle the skin so far effectually, that you awake in the morning pervaded by a sense of languor, which must be very agreeable to a person who has it in his mind to be unhealthy. In order to keep a check upon exhalation about your head (which otherwise might have too much the way of Nature), put on a stout, closely-woven night-cap. People who are at the height of cleverness in this respect sleep with their heads under the bed-clothes. Take no rest on a hair-mattress; it is elastic and pleasant, certainly, but it does not encase the body; and therefore you run a risk of not awaking languid.

Never wash when you go to bed; you are not going to see any body, and therefore there can be no use in washing. In the morning, wet no more skin than you absolutely must—that is to say, no more than your neighbors will see during the day—the face and hands. So much you may do with a tolerably good will, since it is the other part of the surface of the body, more covered and more impeded in the full discharge of its functions, which has rather the more need of ablution; it is therefore fortunate that you can leave that other part unwashed. Five minutes of sponging and rubbing over the whole body in the morning would tend to invigorate the system, and would send you with a cheerful glow to the day’s business or pleasure. Avoid it by all means, if you desire to be unhealthy. Let me note here, that in speaking of the poor, we should abstain from ceding to them an exclusive title, as “the Great Unwashed.” Will you, Mr. N. or M., retire into your room and strip? Examine your body; is it clean—was it sponged this morning—is there no dirt upon it any where? If it be not clean, if it was not sponged, if water would look rather black after you had enjoyed a thorough scrub in it, then is it not obvious that you yourself take rank among the Great Unwashed? By way of preserving a distinction between them and us, I even think it would be no bad thing were we to advocate the washing of the poor.

Do not forget that, although you must unfortunately apply water to your face you can find warrant in custom to excuse you from annoying it with soap; and for the water again, you are at liberty to take vengeance by obtaining compensation damages out of that part of your head which the hair covers. Never wash it; soil it; clog it with oil or lard—either of which will answer your purpose, as either will keep out air as well as water, and promote the growth of a thick morion of scurf. Lard in the bedroom is called bear’s grease. In connection with its virtues in promoting growth of hair, there is a tale which I believe to be no fiction; not the old and profane jest of the man who rubbed a deal box with it over-night, and found a hair-trunk in the morning. It is said that the first adventurer who advertised bear’s grease for sale, appended to the laudation of its efficacy a Nota Bene, that gentlemen, after applying it, should wash the palms of their hands, otherwise the hair would sprout thence also. I admire that speculator, grimly satiric at the expense both of himself and of his customers. He jested at his own pretensions; and declared, by an oblique hint, that he did not look for friends among the scrupulously clean.

Tooth-powder is necessary in the bedroom. Healthy stomachs will make healthy teeth, and then a tooth-brush and a little water may suffice to keep them clean. But healthy stomachs also make coarse constitutions. It is vexatious that our teeth rot when we vitiate the fluid that surrounds them. As gentlemen and ladies we desire good teeth; they must be scoured and hearth-stoned.

Of course, as you do not cleanse your body daily, so you will not show favor to your feet. Keep up a due distinction between the upper and lower members. When a German prince was told confidentially that he had dirty hands, he replied, with the liveliness of conscious triumph,

“Ach, do you call dat dirty? You should see my toes!”

Some people wash them once in every month; that will do very well; or once a year, it matters little which. In what washing you find yourself unable to omit, use only the finest towels, those which inflict least friction on the skin.

Having made these arrangements for yourself, take care that they are adhered to, as far is may be convenient, throughout your household.

Here and there, put numerous sleepers into a single room; this is a good thing for children, if you require to blanch them. By a little perseverance, also, in this way, when you have too large a family, you can reduce it easily. By all means, let a baby have foul air, not only by the use of suffocative apparatus, but by causing it to sleep where there are four or five others in a well-closed room. So much is due to the maintenance of our orthodox rate of infant mortality.

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.

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“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.

SORROWS AND JOYS. (FROM DICKENS’S HOUSEHOLD WORDS.)

Bury thy sorrows, and they shall rise
As souls to the immortal skies,
And then look down like mothers’ eyes.
But let thy joys be fresh as flowers,
That suck the honey of the showers,
And bloom alike on huts and towers.
So shall thy days be sweet and bright—
Solemn and sweet thy starry night—
Conscious of love each change of light.
The stars will watch the flowers asleep,
The flowers will feel the soft stars weep,
And both will mix sensations deep.
With these below, with those above,
Sits evermore the brooding Dove,
Uniting both in bonds of love.
Children of Earth are these; and those
The spirits of intense repose—
Death radiant o’er all human woes.
For both by nature are akin;
Sorrow, the ashen fruit of sin,
And joy, the juice of life within.
O, make thy sorrows holy—wise—
So shall their buried memories rise,
Celestial, e’en in mortal skies.
O, think what then had been their doom,
If all unshriven—without a tomb—
They had been left to haunt the gloom!
O, think again what they will be
Beneath God’s bright serenity,
When thou art in eternity!
For they, in their salvation, know
No vestige of their former woe,
While thro’ them all the Heavens do flow.
Thus art thou wedded to the skies,
And watched by ever-loving eyes,
And warned by yearning sympathies.

MAURICE TIERNAY, THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. (FROM THE DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE)

(_Continued from Page_ 499.)