Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/67

Rh in as much bodily exertion of equal severity, continued with him to the last." All this was more than even Dickens could stand, and, as in the case of Thackeray, the machinery began early to show wear, though it was not until he was fifty-six that there was any manifest abatement of his wonderful forces.

Among statesmen and warriors the strong and healthy predominate, though there are exceptions. As already noted, Bacon was not robust, nor were the Duke of LuxembergLuxemburg [sic] and the Prince of Orange, mentioned previously. The greater Prince of Orange, William the Silent, was of a very different type, as were Marlborough, Gustavus Adolphus, Cromwell, Frederick and our own model of physical manhood, Washington. Among statesmen we may compare with Bacon such men as Gladstone, Bismarck and Lincoln, all of them giants in physical powers.

It goes without saying that the superb will of Napoleon "had its roots in an abnormally firm vitality." His bodily machinery, of which he in some ways took fastidious care, furnished him with a supply of nervous energy at Napoleonic pressure which sufficed for a working day of from fifteen to eighteen hours. He said of himself that he "was conscious of no limit to the amount of work he could get through." It is interesting to note that his critics have made careful study of his physical condition as affecting the outcome of his last compaign. Most of them are of the opinion that there was a visible physical decline, one dating this from the cold of the Moscow campaign; others from his confinement at Elba, while one who knew him well attributed the lassitude which now and then came over him to the feeling of perplexity in the new conditions under which he worked. Whatever may have brought it about, the Napoleon of Waterloo "was no longer the Napoleon of Marengo or Austerlitz, and, though he was not broken down, his physical strength was certainly impaired."

In selecting the representatives of various kinds of brain work, the author has tried to be unbiased by his thesis, and for good-measure allowance to the common notion, has admitted a few names to the list, such as those of the Duke of Luxemberg, which would hardly nowadays find place among the immortals. Of those mentioned, some seventeen may be said to have been more or less delicate from childhood, though most of these were by no means sickly much of the time. Some eight or ten more, like Darwin and Spencer broke down after a healthy, vigorous youth and early manhood. At least fifty were robust and many of these remarkable for physical powers. The remainder were probably above the average in physical endurance, even if their physique and health was not so impressive.

Genius, superior mental power, or whatever we may choose to call that quality which lifts one man above his fellows in any line of work, does not prefer to have lodgment in inferior bodies, and when this so