for one to issue his fiat against farinaceous food in every instance, and another to preach up a medical crusade against all vegetable substances: for a third to obtest mankind by the love they bear their lives to abstain from wine; and a fourth to sing peans (not perhaps quite so poetical as "O fons Blandusiæ,") in praise of water; this is, indeed, to suppose that one set of rules is applicable to every form of a disease, or that the same organ at all times is in the same condition, and similarly affected at different periods, and under different circumstances, by the same agents.

In a word, a popular diet-book, based on such a presumption, is the mere impertinence of physic. We may conclude with old Burton, that in what regards our regimen, "our own experience is the best physician; so great is the variety of palates, humours, and temperaments, that every man should observe, and be a law unto himself. Tiberius, we are told by Tacitus, did laugh at all those who, after thirty years of age, asked counsel of others concerning matters of diet."

At forty, says the adage, a man is either a fool or "a physician; but at any age the individual is likely to become a valetudinarean for life, who lives by medicine, and not by regimen.

We have been carried away from our subject, but our observations are not perhaps altogether irrelevant to it, nor wholly unimportant to our readers. The unbroken vigour of Scott's constitution throughout the greater portion of a life of literary labour, was unquestionably owing to the regularity and temperance of his habits, and to wholesome exercise. But without that exercise, even the "ventrem bene moratum," which Seneca proclaims the advantages of, would not have been sufficient for the

preservation of his health, or the reparation of the vigour that was exhpusted in his study.

The common error of the studious was not his, of devoting day after day, or night after night to some literary pursuit, and of wearying out the body in the constant service of the indefatigable mind: "of compelling (as Plutarch observes) that which is mortal to do as much as that which is immortal; that which is earthly, as that which is etherial." Scott's regular recreations, on the contrary, put the body in a state to obey the suggestions of the stronger and the nobler part. Not an hour did he occupy himself in planting or embellishing his grounds, not a morning did he allot to the pleasures of the chase, nor set apart a portion of his leisure for a joyous ramble in the country, that he did not return from the "deambulatio per amana loca," with recruited spirits, for the encounter of new tóil, and invigorated powers that had shaken off the temporary senectetude of study.

In many points the habits of Milton resembled those of Scott; he was no less temperate, no less sober-minded, but unfortunately the acrimony of party strife sometimes steeped his pen in bitterness approaching to malevolence. The sufferings, however, of a painful malady, might have had not a little to do with the asperity of his politics, The labour moreover of composition, as might be expected from the nature of his productions, was intense, and frequently deprived him of repose. "He would oftentimes," says Richardson, "lie awake whole nights together, but not a verse could he make; at other times he would dictate perhaps forty lines in a breath, and then reduce them to half the number. He held an absurd opinion that his poetic vein never flowed happily, but from the vernal to the autumnal equinox, and that the

coldness of this climate was unfavourable to the flights of his imagination. Till his infirmities confined him to the house, he was in the daily habit of taking exercise in his garden, but in the intervals of his gouty pain, being unable to leave his room, he used to swing in a chair, and sometimes play on an organ; and even this mode of exercise most people will deem preferable to that of Lord Monboddo, who for the sake of his health was accustomed to rise every morning at four o'clock, and then walk about his room, divested of his habiliments, with the window open, for the purpose of enjoying what he called his air bath. But Johnson's idea of exercise was certainly a more agreeable one than either Milton's or Monboddo's; he told Boswell with becoming gravity, "that if he had no duties here, and no reference to futurity, he would spend his life in driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty woman." But, much as we admire the doctor's taste, we rather believe that Scott's mode of taking exercise was the more salubrious of the two.

Those "labores hilares venandi," (as Camden terms the field sports of Staffordshire,) which Scott took delight in, were more likely to produce the effect which Galen has so strongly pointed out the beneficial results of: the promotion of pleasurable excitement by the general diffusion of the animal spirits, as it were, over the whole frame; by the use of exercise, till the whole body tingles with the glow of incipient perspiration—“ usque ad ruborem, sed non ad sudorem." This is indeed the grand point that is to be observed in taking exercise-to take as much as the individual is capable of bearing without fatigue.

It is a folly to think that the necessity for bodily activity may be superseded by means of medicine, or regi

men, or habits, in other respects the best regulated in the world. Exercise is, indeed, indispensable to health; and without health ask the sick man where is happiness, and he may tell you, at least, where it is not, when he points to his own bosom.

But how is exercise to be taken by those who dwell in the busy haunts of the literary world-who are confined to their closets by their pursuits the greater part of the day, or without necessity indulge their literary indolence in the immurement of their study, with the same feelings of veneration for its imprisonment which King James gave such eloquent words to, when he visited the library of Sir Thomas Bodley: "If I were doomed to be a prisoner, and the choice were given me of my prison, this library should be my dungeon; I would desire to be chained by no other bonds than the clasps which incarcerate these pages, and to have no other companions in my captivity than these volumes." How then are the studious to escape from their fascinating pursuits, to devote even an hour to bodily exercise? The first law of nature is said to be self-preservation-the first law of life is motion-its most essential requisite, activity. "Do not be inactive," says the Arab poet, El Wardi, "for water becomes putrid by stagnation, and the moon, by changing, becomes bright and perfect."

CHAPTER XLIII.

SIR WALTER SCOTT CONTINUED.

The same idea, but somewhat amplified, is found in "the Anatomy of Melancholy," in an argument for the necessity of exercise: "The heavens themselves run continually round; the world is never still; the sun travels to the east and to the west; the moon is ever changing in its course; the stars and the planets have their constant motions; the air we breathe is continually agitated by the wind, and the waters never cease to ebb and flow doubtless, for the purpose of their conservation, to teach us that we should ever be in action." The ancients had so much faith in the good effects of exercise, that many of their disorders were treated solely by medical gymnastics. Germanicus was cured of an atrophy by riding, Cicero of a grievous infirmity by travelling. The Roman physicians sent their consumptive patients to Alexandria, and the Greeks shipped their nervous ones to Anticyra-nominally for change of air, but really for the advantages of exercise and recreation. The father of physic was the first who introduced medical gymnastics into practice; he described various sorts of these exercises, but those on which he placed most dependence were friction of the whole frame-somewhat similar to the process of shampooing, and a swinging motion of the hands and arms. The advantages of both modes of promoting the insensible secretion of the skin, and of maintaining the bodily vi