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dinner, I walk till I have perspired five ounces and four scruples; and when I discover, by my chair, that I am so far reduced, I fall to my books, and study away three ounces more. As for the remaining parts of the pound, I keep no account of them. I do not dine and sup by the clock, but by my chair; for when that informs me my pound of food is exhausted, I conclude myself to be hungry, and lay in another with all diligence. In my days of abstinence I lose a pound and a half; and on solemn fasts am two pounds lighter than on other days in the year.

'I allow myself, one night with another, a quarter of a pound of sleep within a few grains more or less; and if upon my rising I find that I have not consumed my whole quantity, I take out the rest in my chair. Upon an exact calculation of wuat I expended and received the last year, which I always register in a book, I find the medium to be two hundred weight, so that I cannot discover that I am impaired one ounce in my health during a whole twelvemonth. And yet, sir, notwithstanding this my great care to ballast myself equally every day, and to keep my body in its proper poise, so it is that I find myself in a sick and languishing condition. My complexion is grown very sallow, my pulse low and my body hydropical. Let me therefore beg you, sir, to consider me as your patient, and to give me more certain rules to walk by than those I have already observed, and you will very much oblige

'Your humble servant.'

This letter puts me in mind of an Italian epitaph written on the monument of a Valetudinarian; Stavo ben, ma per star meg. lio, sto qui:1 which it is impossible to translate. The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their lives, which infallibly destroy them. This is a reflection

1 I was well, but trying to be better, I am here.-L

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made by some historians, upon observing that there ar more thousands killed in a flight than in a battle; and applied to those multitudes of imaginary sick persons that their constitutions by physic, and throw themselves into t of death, by endeavouring to escape it. This method is r dangerous, but below the practice of a reasonable creatur consult the preservation of life, as the only end of it, to m health our business, to engage in no action that is not pa regimen, or course of physic; are purposes so abject, so m unworthy human nature, that a generous soul would rath than submit to them. Besides, that a continual anxiety 1 vitiates all the relishes of it, and casts a gloom over the face of nature; as it is impossible we should take delight thing that we are every moment afraid of losing.

I do not mean, by what I have here said, that I think a to blame for taking due care of their health. On the cont cheerfulness of mind, and capacity for business, are in a grea sure the effects of a well-tempered constitution, a man can at too much pains to cultivate and preserve it. But thi which we are prompted to, not only by common sense, but b and instinct, should never engage us in groundless fears, choly apprehensions, and imaginary distempers, which are to every man who is more anxious to live than how to liv short, the preservation of life should be only a secondary co and the direction of it our principal. If we have this fra mind, we shall take the best means to preserve life, without over solicitous about the event; and shall arrive at that po felicity which Martial has mentioned as the perfection of ness, of neither fearing nor wishing for death.

In answer to the gentleman, who tempers his health by and by scruples, and instead of complying with those solicitations of hunger and thirst, drowsiness or love of ex

[No. 25

ng that there are many na battle; and may be sick persons that break hemselves into the arms This method is not only asonable creature. To y end of it, to make our that is not part of a so abject, so mean, so soul would rather die tinual anxiety for life

gloom over the whole

d take delight in any
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1, that I think any one On the contrary, as ess, are in a great meaon, a man cannot be

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But this care,

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on sense, but by duty ndless fears, melanrs, which are natural n how to live. secondary concern, have this frame of life, without being ve at that point of rfection of happi

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governs himself by the prescriptions of his chair, I shall tell a short fable. Jupiter, says the mythologist, to reward the of a certain countryman, promised to give him whatever he w ask. The countryman desired that he might have the man ment of the weather in his own estate: He obtained his req and immediately distributed rain, snow, and sunshine among several fields, as he thought the nature of the soil required. the end of the year, when he expected to see a more than ordi crop, his harvest fell infinitely short of that of his neighbo upon which (says the fable) he desired Jupiter to take the wea again into his own hands, or that otherwise he should utterly himself.

No. 26. FRIDAY, MARCII 30.

Pallida mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
Regumque turres, O beate Sexti.

Vitæ summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam:
Jam te premet nox, fabulæque manes,

Et domus exilis Plutonia.

HOR.1. 00. xv. 18.

With equal foot, rich friend, impartial fate Knocks at the cottage, and the palace gate; Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares, And stretch thy hopes beyond thy years; Night soon will seize, and you must quickly go To story'd ghosts, and Pluto's house below.

CREECH.

WHEN I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by self in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the p and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are a fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtful that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed a whole after

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in the church-yard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common to all mankind? I could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them, but that they were bort and that they died. They put me in mind of several persons mentioned in the battles of heroic poems, who have sounding names given them, for no other reason but that they may be killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being knocked on the head.

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The life of these men is finely described in holy writ by 'the path of an arrow,' which is immediately closed up and lost.

Upon my going into the church, I entertained myself with the digging of a grave; and saw in every shovelful of it that was thrown up, the fragment of a bone or skull intermixt with a kind of fresh mouldering earth, that some time or other had a place in the composition of a human body. Upon this I began to consider with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty,

strength, and youth, with old-age, weakness, and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter.

After having thus surveyed this great magazine of mortality, as it were, in the lump; I examined it more particularly by the accounts which I found on several of the monuments which are raised in every quarter of that ancient fabric." Some of them were covered with such extravagant epitaphs, that, if it were possible for the dead person to be acquainted with them, he would blush at the praises which his friends have bestowed upon him. There are others so excessively modest, that they deliver the character of the person departed in Greek or Hebrew, and by that means are not understood once in a twelvemonth. In the poetical quarter,] I found there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets. I observed, indeed, that the present war had filled the church with many of these uninhabited monuments, which had been erected to the memory of persons whose bodies were perhaps buried in the plains of Blenheim, or in the bosom of the ocean.

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I could not but be very much delighted with several modern epitaphs, which are written with great elegance of expression and justness of thought, and therefore do honor to the living as weli as to the dead. As a foreigner is very apt to conceive an idea of the ignorance or politeness of a nation, from the turn of their public monuments and inscriptions, they should be submitted to the perusal of men of learning and genius, before they are put in execution. Sir Cloudesly Shovel's monument has very often given me great offence: instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the distinguishing character of that plain gallant man, he is represented on his tomb by the figure of a

• Accounts, which-Monuments, which.-H.

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If he had said, "To pass a judgment on," the double genitive case nad been avoided.-H.

Voi.. V.- -4*

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