INTELLECTUAL AND PHYSICAL LIFE 59 



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. Moliere 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 mus- 

 cular. 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 bal- 

 ance 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 sup- 

 plied 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 evi- 

 dently 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 



