IYMYIMYIMIYIMIYI Of this life he has left a pleasant picture in his "Dialogue with the Gout," in which the disease accuses him of the following conduct: Dialogue GOUT: Let us examine your course of with the Gout. life. While the mornings are long and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested. Immediately afterwards you sit down to write at your desk or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise. But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say, to your sedentary condition. But what is your practise after dinner? Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found to be engaged for two or three hours! This is your perpetual recreation, which is the least eligible of any for a sedentary man, because, instead of accelerating the motion of the fluids, the rigid attention it requires helps to retard the circulation and obstruct internal secretions. Wrapt in the speculations of this wretched game, you destroy your constitution. What can be expected from such a course of living but a body replete with stagnant humours, ready to fall a prey to all kinds of dangerous maladies if I, the Gout, did not occasionally bring you relief by agitating those humours, and so purifying or dissipating them? If it was in some nook or alley in Paris, deprived of walks, that you played at chess after dinner, this might be excusable; but the same taste prevails with you in Passy, Auteuil, Montmartre or Sanoy, places where there are the finest gardens and walks, a pure air, beautiful women and most agreeable and instructive conversation, all which you might enjoy by frequenting the walks. But these are rejected for this abominable НАННАННАН НАНН game of chess. Fie, then, Mr. Franklin! But amidst my instructions I had almost forgotten to administer my wholesome corrections; so take that twinge — and that! FRANKLIN: Oh! Eh! Oh! Ohoh! As much instructions as you please, Madam Gout, and as many reproaches; but pray, madam, a truce with your corrections! Dialogue with the Gout. GOUT: Do you remember how often you have promised yourself, the following morning, a walk in the grove of Boulogne, in the garden of de la Muette, or in your own garden, and have violated your promise, alleging at one time it was too cold, at another too warm, too windy, too moist, or what else you pleased, when in truth it was too nothing but your insuperable love of ease? FRANKLIN: That, I confess, may have happened occasionally, probably ten times in a year. GOUT: Your confession is very far short of the truth; the gross amount is one hundred and ninety-nine times. FRANKLIN: Is it possible? GOUT: So possible that it is fact; you may rely on the accuracy of my statement. You know Mr. Brillon's gardens, and what fine walks they contain; you know the handsome flight of an hundred steps, which lead from the terrace above to the lawn below. You have been in the practise of visiting this amiable family twice a week after dinner, and as it is a maxim of your own that "a man may take as much exercise in walking a mile up and down stairs as in ten on level ground," what an opportunity was here for you to have had exercise in both these ways! Did you embrace it, and how often? FRANKLIN: I cannot immediately answer that question. FRANKLIN: Not once? GOUT: Even so. During the summer you went there at six o'clock. You found the charming lady, with her lovely children and friends, eager to walk with you and entertain you with their agreeable conversation; and what has been your VIVIAIAIAIAIA choice? Why, to sit on the terrace, satisfying yourself with the fine prospect, and passing your eye over the beauties of the garden below, without taking one step to descend and walk about in them. On the contrary, you call for tea and the chess-board; and lo! you are occupied in your seat till nine o'clock, and that besides two hours play after dinner; and then, instead of walking home, which would have bestirred you a little, you step into your carriage. How absurd to suppose that all this carelessness can be reconcilable with health without my interposition! FRANKLIN: I am convinced now of the justness of Poor Richard's remark, that “Our debts and our sins are always greater than we think for." HAHAHAIA÷I FROUDE. I admire that ancient rule of the Jews that every man, no matter of what grade or calling, shall learn some handicraft; that the man of intellect, while, like St. Paul, he is teaching the world, yet, like St. Paul, he may be burdensome to no one. A man was not considered entitled to live if he could not keep himself from starving. you Every Man Should Have a Trade. Surely those university men who had taken honors, breaking stone on an Australian road, were sorry spectacles; and still more sorry and disgraceful is the outcry coming by every mail from our colonies: "Send us no more of what call educated men; send us smiths, masons, carpenters, dayĺaborers; all of those will thrive, will earn their eight, ten or twelve shillings a day; but your educated man is a log on our hands; he loafs in uselessness till his means are spent, he then turns billiard-marker, enlists as a soldier, or starves." It hurts no intellect to be able to make a boat or a house, or a pair of shoes or a suit of clothes, or hammer a horse-shoe; and if you can do either of these, you have nothing to fear from fortune. "I will work with my hands, and keep my brain for myself," said some one proudly, when it was proposed to him that he should make a profession of literature. Spinoza, the most powerful intellectual worker that Europe had produced during the last two centuries, waving aside the pensions and legacies that were thrust upon him, chose to maintain himself by grinding object-glasses for microscopes and telescopes. Now, without taking a transcendental view of the matter, literature happens to be the only occupation in which the wages are not in proportion to the goodness of the work done. It is not that they are generally small, but the adjustment of them PYMIAISIAIIA÷H Literature Not is awry. It is true that in all callings nothing great will be produced if the first object be what you can make by them. To do what you do well should be the first thing, the Paid in Proportion Wages the second; but except in the instances to Its Worth. of which I am speaking, the rewards of a man are in proportion to his skill and industry. The best carpenter receives the highest pay. The better he works, the better for his prospects. The best lawyer, the best doctor, commands most practise and makes the largest fortune. But with literature, a different element is introduced into the problem. The present rule on which authors are paid is by the page and the sheet; the more words, the more pay. It ought to be Great Literary exactly the reverse. Great poetry, great philosoWork is the Fruit of phy, great scientific discovery, every intellectual Long Thought and production which has genius, work, and permaPatient and Painful nence in it, is the fruit of long thought, and patient Elaboration. and painful elaboration. Work of this kind, done hastily, would be better not done at all. When completed, it will be small in bulk; it will address itself for a long time to the few and not to the many. The reward for it will not be measurable, and not obtainable in money except after many generations, when the brain out of which it was spun has long returned to its dust. Only by accident is a work of genius immediately popular, in the sense of being widely bought. No collected edition of Shakespeare's plays was demanded in Shakespeare's life. Milton received five pounds for "Paradise Lost." The distilled essence of the thought of Bishop Butler, the greatest prelate that the English Church ever produced, fills a moderatesized octavo volume; Spinoza's works, including his surviving letters, fill but three; and though they have revolutionized the philosophy of Europe, have no attractions for the multitude. A really great man has to create the taste with which he is to be enjoyed. There are splendid exceptions of merit eagerly recognized and early rewarded-our honored English Laureate for |