Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/63

Rh houses were even worse in hygienic conditions then than now, and cold and fatigue seem to have injured his health. He continued his acting and writing with scarce abated vigor until his fifty-fourth year, when, just after playing the part of the invalid in the "Imaginary Invalid," he burst a blood vessel in a fit of coughing and did not survive more than half an hour. Molière was described as "neither too stout nor too thin, tall rather than short; he had a noble carriage, a good leg and his complexion was brown." This eye-witness saw nothing especially sickly or feeble about the great player and playwright. Goethe, great as scientist and novelist as well as poet—a universal genius—was? likened in his youth to an Apollo. His frame was strong and muscular. In his mature years, Hufeland, one of the great physicians of the time said that "never did he meet with a man in whom bodily and mental organization were so perfect. Not only was the prodigious strength of vitality remarkable in him, but equally so the perfect balance of functions."

Goethe knew what sickness meant. From self-confessed youthful excesses (" However sound and strong one may be, in that accursed Leipzig one burns out as fast as a bad torch") he suffered some severe chest affection and he was for a time "uncertain whether he was not yet consumptive." In mature life he more than once suffered from renal colic and from rheumatism. Such attacks had but a transient effect, however, upon his wonderful physical make-up. He was a big eater, as have been so many great men (energy for work must be supplied by bread and butter) and he was a profound sleeper. Even when beyond the age of eighty he was still so vigorous as to produce truly remarkable works.

Of the personal history of Dante we know little, but he was evidently made of elastic stuff and we read of no sickness which came to him in his wanderings. He took part in the civil wars of his city. He died at fifty-six of a fever contracted in the lagoons of Venice.

Milton possessed a "peculiar grace of personal appearance." He seems to have been in good health up to about forty years, when he lost ground somewhat, and in later life, especially during his blindness, his health declined. Speaking for himself at forty-seven, he says: "Though thin, I was never deficient in courage or in strength." He exercised regularly with the broadsword and says he "was a match for any one." His blindness seemed to accompany the onset of gout, a disease hardly due in his case to intemperate living.

Of the great modern English poets, Tennyson was a man of splendid physique—"one of the finest-looking men in the world." In regard to his health he said of himself: "What my infirmities were I know not unless short sight and occasional hypochondria be infirmities."

Wordsworth, according to Hayden the artist, was of very fine heroic