Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

posed to bring melancholy along with it. I do not believe it. I believe that many a temperate old man, who has nevertheless indulged a reasonable appetite, is as cheerful as the majority of young ones. But age will have shadows with a vengeance if it has been intemperate; and middle life will be plunged in them before its time. Purple faces and a jovial corpulence may impose upon the spectator; but the sick gentleman within knows what his tenement consists of. A fool may indeed go to his grave pretty comfortably; a mere animal, a human prize ox, may swell and abuse his system for a long time, because he has no intellect to be hurt by it, and to hurt him in turn; but good sense in the head, and a perpetual contradiction of it in the stomach, will never do in the long run. The head ought to rule; the stomach will revenge its bad government by sending up its angry ambassadors of megrims and vapors; and the anxiety and irritability of the ruler will in time revenge itself on the stomach.

Are we not then to obey the impulses and benevolences of Nature? Have we palates and appetites for nothing? Are we to turn hermits and starvelings, and not enjoy ourselves?

By no means. There is the simple, and eternal, and benevolent law of Nature: "Earn, and you may enjoy." Experience adds, Enjoy truly, and you will know what it is to enjoy with reason. And Nature adds, Enjoy with reason in general; and occasionally I will smile and shut my eyes when friends and festivity call upon you for an amiable delirium. Would you enable yourself to eat heartily,

yet without oppression? Secure a good digestion with exercise. Would you enable yourself to take a reasonable portion of wine? Spin your blood first with exercise, that it may not be roused too abruptly, and fevered. Would you be free from melancholy, a strong and cheerful man, an old man free from the clouds and peevishness of old age? Wash, exercise, and be temperate, that you may throw off ill humors at the pores, and not have your soul incrusted with sordidness of the body. As much, perhaps, ought to be said about washing as about exercise. It is a duty not sufficiently attended to in our chill climate. There is a story of a Scotchwoman, who attempted to drown herself in a fit of melancholy. She was taken out of the water in a doubtful state, and underwent an active rubbing, according to the process of the Humane Society. She not only returned to life, but recovered her health and spirits; the physicians pronouncing, that twenty to one her melancholy was entirely owing to her dirt. There is the same reaction in this respect as in the other. Melancholy people are apt to grow careless of their persons; people who are careless of their persons grow melancholy. But cleanliness is the first of virtues; not the first in rank, but the first in necessity.* The most selfish people can practise it for their own sakes; the rest

"Cleanliness," observes Charles Lamb, in that little neglected essayling, entitled Saturday Night, "says some sage man, is next to Godliness. It may be: but how it came to sit so very near, is the marvel. Methinks some of the more human virtues might have put in for a place before it. Justice - Humanity Temperance - - are positive qualities; the courtesies, and little civil offices of life, had I been Master of the Ceremonies to that Court, should have sate above the salt in preference to a mere negation." —ED.

ought to practise it for themselves and others. With regard to exercise, judge between the two following extremes: A fox-hunter can get drunk every night in the year, and yet live to an old age; but then he is all exercise, and no thought. A sedentary scholar shall not be able to get drunk once in a year with impunity; but then he is all thought, and no exercise. Now the great object is neither to get drunk, nor to be all exercise, nor to be all thought; but to enjoy all our pleasures with a sprightly reason. The four ordinary secrets of health are, early rising, exercise, personal cleanliness, and the rising from table with a stomach unoppressed. There may be sorrows in spite of these; but they will be less with them; and nobody can be truly comfortable without.

There is a great rascal going about town (a traveller to boot in foreign countries, particularly in the East and in the South) who does a world of mischief, under the guise of helping you to a digestion. I am loath to mention him. His very name is beneath the dignity and grace of my Platonic philosophy. But I must. He talks much about the liver. Some

times he calls himself the Blue Pill, sometimes one thing, sometimes another. He is particularly fond of being denominated "the most innocent thing in the world." Let the sufferer beware of him. He may turn his company to advantage a few times, provided, and only provided, he does not anticipate his acquaintance, or let him divert him from his better remedies. Wherever he threatens to become a habit, let the patient take to his heels. Nothing but exercise can save him. He is only surfeit in disguise; a

perpetual tempter to repletion, under the guise of preventing the consequences. The excess is tempted, and the consequences are not prevented; for, at the least, one ill is planted in the constitution instead of another. Disguise the scoundrel as we may, he is only, in a small shape, what an emetic was to Vitellius, or a bath of mud to the drunken barbarian.* Sometimes, with an unblushing foresight and intention, he is even taken before dinner! Imagination escapes from the thought of an abuse so gross. I dart, upon the wings of my Wishing-Cap, out doors, and hail, as I go, those light bodies and animating looks, which are the happy results of Exercise.

No. X.

THE VALLEY OF LADIES.

Poichè noi fummo qui, ò io desiderato di menarvi in parte assai vicina di questo luogo, dove is non credo che moi alcuna fosse di voi; e chiamavisi la Valle delle Donne. - DECAMERON.

Since we have been here, I have longed to take you into a spot close by, where none of you, I think, have ever been. It is called the Valley of Ladies.

A

S the spring advanced here in Tuscany, and the

leaves all came out, and the vines rose like magic, and day after day the green below was contrasted with a blue southern sky overhead, I began, modestly speaking, to be reconciled to the beauties of Italy. I was wrong when I said there were no trees

* One of the O'Neales used to inflame himself with drinking, and then stand up to the neck in a bath of mud to cool.

in this neighborhood except olives. We have a few poplars, oaks, and young chestnuts, &c., which make an agreeable variety. They incrust the lanes with a decent quantity of hedge and bower. But the vines make an astonishing difference. In the winter you see nothing of thousands of them; in the spring out they come, from a bit of a trunk, like so much fairywork, and grow with a marvellous rapidity. In a few weeks they are up round their standards, and climbing their trees; doubling, as it were, at one blow, the whole prospect of green. Add to this the noble growth of the corn, and the exuberance of everything wild about the hedges, and spring is tenfold spring here to what it is in the north. The contrast is more striking, because there is no green in winter except dark firs and cypresses and the hazylooking olive. The beautiful grass, which remains all the year round in England, gives a sort of perpetual summer to the earth, whatever may be the case with the sky; but the sky in Italy during winter, though it has glorious intervals of blue and warmth, is inclement enough to make the inhabitants chatter with cold, and there is no verdure on the ground. All this being the case, the very green of the vines had in it something of England; and as the ground is no sooner dry here than it is very dry, I put vigor in my steps, and my Orlando Innamorato in my pocket, and did my best to fancy myself at once abroad and at home in the sunny-bowered Valley of Ladies.

The Valley of Ladies is a spot celebrated in the sixth and seventh books of the Decameron. It lies at the foot of one of the Fiesolan hills, about two miles

« ZurückWeiter »