6o TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 Eydal 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 wbich 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 



