spoken, which separates enthusiasm from insanity, is like the narrow bridge of Al Sirat, which leads the followers of Mahomet from earth to heaven, but by so narrow a path, that the passenger is in momentary danger of falling into the dismal gulf of hell, which yawns beneath him. But Scott was in little peril of falling into the purgatory of enthusiasm: if he ever advanced towards the boundary in question, it was with a steady step and an air of self-possession, which showed he was prepared for the dangers he approached.

But independently of the well-regulated habits by which he was enabled to accomplish so vast a number of literary performances, nature appears to have endowed his constitution with a robustness, proportioned to the vigour of his mind, which was capable of overcoming mental labour without fatigue, which would have been not only wearisome but overwhelming to another. There is something in the vigour of the higher order of genius, which contributes not only to longevity, but renders the individual equal to labours which one can hardly imagine the powers of one man capable of accomplishing,

"Those," says Tissot, "who would undertake the defence of long-continued studies, which I am far from wishing to under-rate the importance of, in pointing out the dangers to which literary men expose themselves by excessive application, may cite many instances of studious men who have attained old age, in the full enjoyment of health, bodily and mental. I am not ignorant of the history of such persons. I have even known some few, but the generality havo not the same good fortune to boast of; there are few men, however happily constituted, strong enough to

support with impunity such excessive toil; and if they did support it, who knows what sufferings they may not have endured, and if they might have added to their length of days, had they attached themselves to another sort of life? It is true, we must admit, that the greater portion of those great men that the human race acknowledge for its masters, had arrived to an advanced age: Homer, Democritus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Plato, Plntarch, Bacon, Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, Locke, Leibnitz, Newton, all lived to be old men, but from this must we infer that excessive mental application is not injurious? Let us beware of drawing so false a conclusion. We may only presume that there are men born for those sorts of excesses, and perhaps that a happy disposition of the fibres which form great men, is the same as that which conduces to longevity. Mens sana in corpore sano. Besides it is much more by the strength of their genius, than by the assiduity of their labour, that literary men make to themselves an immortal name, Moments of delightful leisure, distractions which celebrity necessarily brings with it, exercise which the duties of their high station in the world obliges them to take, these in a great measure tend to repair the evil which literary employment occasions."

Tissot proceeds to eulogise the well-regulated habits of an eminent professor of Oriental literature, who had just died, and had he been speaking of the author of Waverley, he could not have used language more suitable, or more characteristic of the subject of his notice.

"Every body remembers at this moment," he continues, "and recalls even before I name him, that great

man who for more than fifty years was the ornament, and the delight of this city and its academies: he had cultivated the sciences from his earliest youth even to his last days; he was profoundly versed in all those studies which were more immediately the business of his vocation, and of which the domain is so extensive; there was no subject on which he was not instructed; so much knowledge implied immense labour, yet his health was not injured by it; we have seen him enter on his eighteenth lustrum, without having lost a particle of his genius, or of the vivacity of his senses; and will this example be adduced as an objection to my argument? It cannot be, for the recollection of the details of his life that are given here, fulfil the purposes of presenting him as a model for the contemplation of all men of genius. He knew how to be a scholar without ceasing to be a man; he knew how to acquire the profoundest knowledge, and the most various attainments, without secrificing his duties to erudition, in performing those of a citizen, a father, a friend, a member of society, and a professor of learning, as if he had been only a simple citizen, a domestic being, and a man of the world. When wearied by his mental labours it was his custom to repair his strength and spirits by exercising his body in the cultivation of his grounds, and he supported both by that gaiety of heart, that amenity of manners, which is killed in the study, and which is only maintained by communing with our fellow-men for our mutual advantage."

CHAPTER XLI.

SIR WALTER SCOTT CONTINUED.

The health of Scott derived no little advantage from such exercise and intercourse as Tissot speaks of. We are told by Allan Cunningham, "it was his pleasure to walk out frequently among his plantations, with a small hatchet and hand saw, with which he lopped off superfluous boughs, or removed an entire tree when it was maring the growth of others. He loved also to ride over the country, on a little stout galloway, and the steepest hill did not stop him, nor the deepest water daunt him." His passion for field sports furnished him likewise with a recreation, which was no less conducive to his wellbeing; his taste for such pastime is, indeed, a singularity which is not often to be met with in men of studious habits. Literature, they think, is the noblest pleasure that can be chased, and it is unfortunately the only one they pursue. There are so few instances on record, of literary men indulging in the pleasures of the field, that it seems almost incongruous to speak in the same breath of a scholar and a sportsman. But Scott was an exception; when his imagination was wearied "with babbling of green fields," he betook himself to them with a right good appetite, for the wholesome recreation they afforded. With his "veteran favourite," Maida, "the fleetest of highland deer-hounds," it was his delight to sally forth, and to make the pleasures of the course the object or the excuse for many a delightful ramble over

the romantic hills of his native country. Perhaps it was the frequency of such rambles which induced the Ettrick Shepherd to believe that " he had a little of the old outlaw blood in him, and if he had been able would have been a desperate poacher and black fisher." But with all the poaching propensities of the author of Waverley, no Sir Thomas Lacy of his neighbourhood suffered from them; he only hunted deer, but we are not informed by the worthy Shepherd that he ever stole them.

The fact is, that exercise was essential to his health, and in combining it with field-sports, he gave the charm of a manly and wholesome recreation to what might be considered a duty to his constitution. If there be an antidote to the toil of composition it is exercise; and if there be a preventive of the ills which literary flesh is heir to, it is regimen. Scott well knew the advantages of both, but most sadly are they overlooked by authors in general. An hour or two in the afternoon devoted to a few calls on their friends is deemed sufficient for the reparation of nervous energy, exhausted by the unintermitting labour of six or seven hours; they feel they are unequal to fatigue, for muscular strength is the barometer of the vital powers, and therefore the employment of the locomotive organs is wholly neglected. If the night is devoted to mental application, the morning makes amends for the hours which have been stolen from the natural period of repose, and what matters it whether the moon or the noonday sun presides over their slumbers? It un- . fortunately matters much more than they imagine ; they devote their nervous energies to the greatest of all labours at a period when all nature is deprived of the vivifying principle which animates every object in the animal or vegetable kingdom, and "steep their senses in