of the mind, avoid envy, anxious fears, anger, fretting inwards, subtile and knotty inquisitions, joys and exhilarations in excess, sadness not communicated. [7] Entertain hopes, mirth rather than joy, variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them: wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histo[8] rics, fables, and contemplations of nature. If you fly physic in health altogether, it will be too strange for your body when you shall need it; if you make it too familiar, it will work no extraordinary effect when sick[9] ness cometh. I commend rather some diet for certain seasons, than frequent use of physic, except it be grown into a custom; for those diets alter the body [10] more, and trouble it less. Despise no new acci[11] dent in your body, but ask opinion of it. In sickness, respect health principally; and in health, action; for those that put their bodies to endure in combined, will be sure to tell upon the constitution—if not at once, yet at least as years advance. One who is of the character of an active or passive verb, or, still more, both combined, though he may be said to have lived long in every thing but years, will rarely reach the age of the neuters.-W. Inquisitions: Synonyme? Communicated: Synonyme ? [7.] Mirth: How distinguished from joy? Fables: works of the imagination, particularly epic or dramatic poems. No other fables "fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects." [9.] Commend: Equivalent? kind of food. Some diet: some specific [10.] Accident: striking, or unaccustomed change of conAsk, &c. Take medical advice. dition. Equivalent? [11.] Respect: Have regard to. Of it: Tendering: Synonyme? health, may, in most sicknesses which are not very sharp, be cured only with diet and tendering. Cel- 12] sus could never have spoken it as a physician, had he not been a wise man withal, when he giveth it for one of the great precepts of health and lasting, that a man do vary and interchange contraries; but with an inclination to the more benign extreme: use fasting and full eating, but rather full eating; watching and sleep, but rather sleep; sitting and exercise, but rather exercise, and the like: so shall nature be cherished and yet taught masteries. Physicians are some of them [13] so pleasing and conformable to the humour of the patient, as they press not the true cure of the disease; and some other are so regular in proceeding according to art for the disease, as they respect not sufficiently the condition of the patient. Take one of a [14] [12.] Full eating: full satisfaction of hunger. [13.] Other : in modern usage, others. As they that they. : [14.] Either: each. 'On either side of the river.'-Rev. 22:2. When should either, and when should each, be employed? Faculty: Synonyme ? To the directions and counsels of Lord Bacon, in this Essay, we shall add a part of one of the 'Greyson Letters,' by Henry Rogers, on the same subject, both for the sake of the excellence of the matter and of the style, which may be compared with that of Bacon:-"Comply to the utmost of your power with the general conditions of health, which are equally to be observed by every body, and which, when diseases can be cured, will generally suffice to cure them-though a wise physician may do much to aid the process. Take all the indications nature itself gives you, and act upon them rigidly. Be regular in your hours-take plenty of air and exercise-do not rob yourself of the proper quantum of sleep for business, or for any thing-however necessary you may deem it. Above all, be careful to take that diet which you feel by experience best middle temper; or, if it may not be found in one man, combine two of either sort: and forget not to call as well the best acquainted with your body, as the best reputed of for his faculty. .... agrees with you . . . . We almost all eat more than fairly can be assimilated, and hence a chronic failure in the tone of the organ habitually overworked. . . . . Whether the taking of food beyond what nature requires, be the effect of involuntary or voluntary depravity of appetite, your old Mentor and mine is of opinion that, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, it is the cause, remote or proximate, of all the infinite forms of that comprehensive disease, which lets our consciousness into a secret which nature intended we should be ignorant of,-namely, "that we have stomachs." He affirms, and I rather think with truth, that nearly all the learned talk that is made about the quality of food as wholesome, or otherwise, difficult or easy of digestion, might be spared, if only people sinned not in quantity.-Pp. 293, 294. 1. Re-write the Essay, with a view to present the thoughts in a more perspicuous and popular style, with a suitable arrangement into paragraphs. 2. What familiar advice for the preservation of health does Bacon omit ? 3. What class of persons are wittily compared by Whately to neuter verbs ¿ 4. What important counsels for the preservation of health are given by Rogers? ESSAY XVII. SUSPICION. SUSPICIONS amongst thoughts are like bats [1] amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight: certainly they are to be repressed, or at the least well guarded; for they cloud the mind, they lose friends, and they check [1.] Are like bats, &c.: As there are dim-sighted persons, who live in a sort of perpetual twilight, so there are some who, having neither much clearness of head, nor a very elevated tone of morality, are perpetually haunted by suspicions of every body and every thing. Such a man attributes--judging in great measure from himself-interested and selfish motives to every one. Accordingly, having no great confidence in his own penetration, he gives no one credit for an open and straightforward character, and will always suspect some underhand dealings in every one, even when he is unable to perceive any motive for such conduct, and when the character of the party affords no ground for suspicion. ('Ill-doers are ill-deemers.') One, on the contrary, who has a fair share of intelligence, and is himself thoroughly upright, will be comparatively exempt from this torment. He knows, from consciousness, that there is one honest man in the world; and he will consider it very improbable that there should be but one. He will therefore look carefully to the general character and conduct of those he has to deal with; suspecting those-and those only-who have given some indications of a want of openness and sincerity, trusting those who have given proof of an opposite character, and keeping his judgment suspended as to those of whom he has not sufficient knowledge.-W. Suspicions: the act of suspecting evil; the imagining of the existence, of something without proof, or upon very slight evidence. Lose: cause us to Jose. Check with: interfere with; clash with. [Negotia interpellant.-Lat. Ed.] with business, whereby business cannot go on currently and constantly: they dispose kings to tyranny, husbands to jealousy, wise men to irresolution and melancholy they are defects not in the heart but in the brain; for they take place in the stoutest natures: as in the example of Henry the Seventh of England; there was not a more suspicious man nor a more stout: and in such a composition they do small hurt; for commonly they are not admitted but with examination, whether they be likely or no; but in fearful natures they gain 'It was not comely or fitting that in prayers we should make a God or Saviour of any of the saints in heaven; neither was it fitting to make them check with our Saviour.'-Strype, 1535. Currently progressively. 'Time, as it currently goes on establishes a custom.'-Hayward. : Henry, &c. In his Life of this king, Bacon thus writes :'He was a prince, sad, serious, and full of thoughts, and secret observations, and full of notes and memorials, especially touching persons; as, whom to employ, whom to reward, whom to inquire of, whom to beware of, what were the dependencies, what were the factions, and the like: keeping as it were, a journal of his thoughts. He was indeed full of apprehensions and suspicions; but as he did easily take them, so he did easily check them and master them; whereby they were not dangerous, but troubled himself more than others.'-Pp. 476, 477. Stout: bold, brave. [Quo non fuit suspicacior nec tamen animosior.-Lat. Ed.] 'He lost the character of a bold, stout, magnanimous man.'-Clarendon. Stout, in our early writers (as in the English Bible) was used chiefly or wholly in the sense of strong or bold; as, a stout champion; a stout heart; a stout resistance, &c. At a later period it was used for thick-set or bulky; and more recently, especially in England, the idea has been carried still further, so that Taylor says in his Synonymes, The stout man has the proportions of an ox; he is corpulent, fat, and fleshy in relation to his size.' Few in America entirely drop the original sense of strong and bold; and many who have read Washington Irving's "Stout Gentleman "never suspected that he was merely a very fat man.-Webster. |