Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/65

Rh seventy lie was active and vigorous." He easily outwalked James Hogg, who was much younger and who has been described as "hale and hearty as a mountain breeze." So much for this "invalid."

Lamb, who had "the appearance of an air-fed man and whose light frame" with its "almost immaterial legs" "seemed as if a breath would overthrow it," was spoken of as being "as wiry as an Arab," and Proctor said he "could walk during all the day."

In this list of worthies Carlyle and Doctor Johnson should have a place. The great lexicographer "in his bodily strength and stature has been compared to Polyphemus." Boswell speaks of his "herculean strength" and of his "robust health," which was not in the least affected by cold. His great appetite and his intemperance in tea have gone into history, but he could fast for two days without difficulty, and his frequent prayer was "that I may practice such temperance in Meat, Drink, and Sleep, and all bodily enjoyments as may fit me for the duties to which thou shalt call me." Notwithstanding his tendency to melancholia and some attacks of gout he was anything but an invalid.

The Seer of Chelsea was the descendant of a long line of "hardy and healthy Scottish dalesmen." He grew to manhood, he tells us, "healthy and hardy." It was not till after his twentieth year that "he became aware that he was the miserable owner of a diabolical arrangement called a stomach." From this time on he suffered from dyspepsia, headache and sleeplessness. He gave vent to his irritability by lamentations so grotesquely exaggerated as to make it difficult to estimate the real extent of the evil. According to Froude he had a Titanesque power of making mountains out of molehills. Notwithstanding his complaints he lived a vigorous, combative life to a good old age and even at eighty-two was able to walk over five miles a day.

Among novelists, Sir Walter accuses himself of perhaps "setting an undue value" on health and strength. For him "bodily health is the mainspring of the microcosm. . . . What poor things does a fever fit or an overflowing of bile make of the masters of creation?" He writes in his journal, "My early lameness considered, it was impossible for a man to have been stronger or more active than I have been, and that for twenty or thirty years. Seams will slit and elbows will out, quoth the tailor; and as I was fifty-four in August last, my mortal vestments are none of the newest." As a young man he was a desperate climber, a bold rider and a stout player at single-stick "and he walked twenty or thirty miles without fatigue, notwithstanding his limp." Attacks of rheumatism, renal colic and the awful burden of debt under which he toiled so heroically, finally overcame a constitution which, as he said, was "as strong as a team of horses."

Victor Hugo "was born with a thoroughly sound constitution"