Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/64

60 proportions. He led a simple life and was healthy and vigorous. He was "as robust as one of the peasants of his native Cumberland." At sixty he walked fifteen to twenty miles a day; he was "still the crack skater on Rydal Lake, and, as to climbing mountains, the hardiest and youngest are yet hardly a match for him." Even at seventy-three he was "wonderfully well and full of vigor."

Browning had some headache, sore throat and colds, but his son wrote, "He was the healthiest man I ever knew," and another biographer called him "brilliantly healthy." Until past seventy he could take long walks without fatigue, and endure an amount of social and general physical strain which would have tried many younger men.

If we turn to the writers of what Dr. Johnson called "irregular and undigested pieces"—of essays—in the expectation of having only invalids for wielders of the pen, we find the inventor of this beautiful form of literature, Montaigne, speaks of his body as "strong and well knit." "My health is vigorous and sprightly, even to a well-advanced age, and I am rarely troubled with sickness." He considered health "the fairest and richest present that nature can make us." It was not a time of long living and Montaigne considered that he had reached a "well advanced age" when he had passed forty. At forty-five he became afflicted with stone in the bladder, which doubtless shortened the days of what was for him old age.

Bacon's health was always delicate. He speaks of himself as "a man of no great share of health, who must therefore lose much time." His nervous system seems to have been exceedingly sensitive and he swooned upon slight cause. By careful management of his health by the admirable rules he has laid down for others, he survived the storms of his political career and his friends expected for him a good old age. In his sixty-sixth year, when driving in London, he suddenly hit upon the notion of using snow as a preservative. He stopped his carriage, purchased a fowl and with his own hands stuffed it with snow. He was seized with a sudden chill, the cold and chill were succeeded by bronchitis, and he died within a few days. Bacon, like Kant, deserves to be remembered as one who lived his philosophy and who with small resource of vital energy kept that at its best and so made the most of the marvelously fine thinking machinery with which he was endowed.

The more modern essayists. Lamb and DeQuincy, did not present a very vigorous aspect. DeQuincy was, according to Carlyle, "one of the smallest man figures I ever saw, . . you would have taken him for the beautifullest little child." Yet he was not so frail even though small, and while hypersensitive to pain "he was wiry, and able to undergo a good deal of fatigue. Indeed he was a first-rate pedestrian, and kept himself well in exercise. He considered that fourteen miles a day was necessary for health. He never took cold, and even at