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shew an inclination to please them, would make them entirely at ease. Do not such women deserve all the misinterpretation which they neglect to avoid? Or are they not in the actual practice of guilt, who care not whether they are thought guilty or not? If my wife does the most ordinary thing, as visiting her sister, or taking the air with her mother, it is always carried with the air of a secret. Then she will sometimes tell a thing of no consequence, as if it was only want of memory made her conceal it before; and this only to dally with my anxiety. I have complained to her of this behaviour in the gentlest terms imaginable, and beseeched her not to use him, who desired only to live with her like an indulgent friend, as the most morose and. unsociable husband in the world. It is no easy matter to describe our circumstance; but it is miserable, with this aggravation; that it might be easily mended, and yet no remedy endeavoured. She reads you, and there is a phrase or two in this letter which she will know came from me. If we enter into an explanation which may tend to our future quiet by your means, you shall have our joint thanks; in the. mean time I am (as much as I can in this ambiguous condition be any thing),

C MR. SPECTATOR,

SIR,

Your humble servant.'

GIVE me leave to make you a present of a character not yet described in your papers, which is that of a man who treats his friend with the same odd variety which a fantastical female tyrant practises towards her lover. I have for some time had a friendship with one of these mercurial persons. The rogue I know loves me, yet takes advantage of my fondness for him to use me as he pleases. We are by turns the best friends and the greatest strangers imaginable. Sometimes you would think s inseparable; at other times he avoids me for a long time, yet neither he nor I know why. When w meet next by chance, he is amazed He has not sebå

me, is impatient for an appointment the same evening; and when I expect he should have kept it, I have known him slip away to another place; where he has sat reading the news, when there is no post; smoking his pipe, which he seldom cares for; and staring about him in company with whom he had nothing to do, as if he wondered how he came there.

That I may state my case to you the more fully, I shall transcribe some short minutes I have taken of him in my almanack since last spring; for you must know there are certain seasons of the year, according to which, I will not say our friendship, but the enjoyment of it rises or falls. In March and April he was as various as the weather; in May and part of June, I found him the sprightliest best-humoured fellow in the world; in the dog-days he was much upon the indolent; in September, very agreeable but very busy; and since the glass fell last to changeable, he has made three appointments with me, and broke them every one. However I have good hopes of him this winter, especially if you will lend me your assistance to reform him, which will be a great ease and pleasure to,

October 9, 1711.

STEELE

SIR,

• Your most humble servant.'

T

No 195. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1711.

Νηπίου, &&

ιςασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἡμισυ παν]ος.

Ουδ' όσον εν μαλαχη τε δε ασφοδέλω μεγ ̓ ἐνειας.
HES. Oper. & Dier. l. i. ver. 40.

Fools, not to know that half exceeds the whole,
Nor the great blessings of a frugal board!

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

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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 artifically that nothing appeared. He likewise took a mall, and after hav ing hollowed the handle, and that part which strikes the ball, he inclosed in them several drugs after the same manner as in the ball itself. 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 curel him of an indisposition which all the compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able to remove. This eastern allegory is finely contrived to shew us how beneficial bodily labour 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 an human body, how absolutely necessary exercise is for its preservation. I shall in this place recommend another preservative of health, which in many cas es produces the same effects as exercise, and may, in some measure, supply its place, where opportunities of exercise are wanting. 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, expence of money, or loss of time. If exercise throws off all superfluities, temperance prevents them; if exercise clears the vessels, temperance neither satiates nor overstrains them; if exercise raises proper ferments in the humours, and promotes the circulation of the blood, temperance gives nature her full play, and enables her to exert herself in all her force and vigour; if exercise dissipates a growing distemper, temperance

starves it.

Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute 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 an habitual course of exercise and temperance, there would be but little oecasion for them. Accordingly 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. Blistering, cupping, bleeding, are seldom of use 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 not he prevented him. 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 have begged his servants to tie down his hands, had he seen him devour fowl, fish, and flesh; swallow oil and vinegar, wines and spices; throw down sallads of twenty different herbs, sauces of an hundred ingredients, confections and fruits of numberless sweets and flavours? 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.

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

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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.

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. Were I to consider Were I to consider my readers as my patients, and to prescribe such a kind of temperance as is accommodated to all persons, and such as is particularly suitable to our climate and way of liv ing, I would copy the following rules of a very eminent physician, Make your whole repast out of one dish. If you indulge in a second, avoid drinking any thing strong, till you have finished your meal; at the same time abstain from all sauces, or at least such as are not the most plain and simple.' A man could not be well guilty of gluttony, if he stuck to these few obvious and easy rules. In the first case, there would be no variety of taste to solicit his palate, and occasion excess; nor in the second, any artificial provocatives to relieve satiety, and create a false appetite. Were I to prescribe a rule for drinking, it should be formed upon a saying quoted by Sir William Temple; The first glass for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good-humour, and the fourth for mine enemies.' But because it is impossible for one who lives in the world to diet himself always in so philosophical a manner, think every man should have his days of abstinence, according as his constitution will permit. These are great reliefs to nature, as they qualify her for struggling with hunger and thirst, whenever any distemper or duty, of life may put her upon such difficulties; and at the same time give her an opportunity of extricating herself from her oppressions, and recovering the several tones and springs of her distended vessels. Besides that, ab

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