The example and advice of the Cardinal de Salis may close this enumeration of the various diet of the long livers,* with the addition of that of the celebrated Cornaro, who found at seventy-eight that a sparing diet was essential to his health and comfort.† By the persuasion of his friends he increased it only a sixth part, and it brought on disease with mortal tendency ; but, resuming his abstemiousness, he was in a joyous and vivacious state at eighty-three, and so continued until he completed a century. His food was varied and gratifying,|| but his spirits and safety depended on its being

death. She lived a very temperate life, though she had kept a little public house for seventy years. Her chief sustenance for the last two years was brown sugar and cold water."-Easton, p. 244.

*He was Archbishop of Seville, and lived to one hundred and ten. He enjoyed to the last every faculty except strength and hearing. When asked by his friends what regimen he observed, he used to tell them"By being old when I was young, I find myself young now that I am old. I have led a sober and studious, but not a lazy or sedentary life. My diet was sparing, though delicate my liquors, the best wines of Xeres and La Mancha; but never at any time exceeded a pint, except in cold weather, when I allowed myself a third more. I rode or walked every day, except in rainy weather, when I exercised for a couple of hours. As to the mind, I endeavoured to preserve it in due temper by a scrupulous obedience to the Divine commands, and by keeping a conscience void of offence towards God and man." He was the last surviving son of the author of "The Conquest of Mexico."-Ib., 203-5.

"If a man is willing to live long in the enjoyment of his food, let him live sparingly." His habit was to take twelve ounces of food a day, in bread, soups, yolks of eggs, and meat, and fourteen ounces of wine.Cornaro on Old Age, p. 32.

He increased what he ate to fourteen ounces, and his drink to six teen. "This augmentation of diet was so prejudicial to me, that, brisk as I had been, I began to be sad and out of humour. Everything offendod me; and upon the least occasion I broke out into a passion. At twelve days' end I was taken with a violent fit of the colic; that was followed by a continual fever, which tormented me for thirty-five days together. For the first fifteen days it put me into such an agony that it was impossible for me to take a quarter of an hour's sleep at a time. My friends several times believed me to be a dying man. Nothing freed me from this danger but resuming the regimen which I had so long ob served."-Ib., p. 33.

"The life I lead is as happy a one as can be wished for in this world. I am still so strong at fourscore and three as to mount a horse without any help. I can not only go down stairs without any concern, but likewise descend a hill. I am always merry; always pleased; always in humour; and maintaining a happy peace in my own mind, the serenity of which appears at all times in my countenance."-Ib., 50.

"What I eat is as follows: bread, soup, new-laid eggs, veal, kid, mutton, partridges, pullets, and pigeons. Of the seafish I choose golde nies [John Dories?] and of the riverfish the pike."-Ib., p. 81.

small in quantities; and this is the advice which he gives to all who wish to have what he calls a "happy and blessed life," by being so regulated.* His farther remarks on the benefits derivable from longevity deserve also to be remembered...

All these facts and views may lead us to the conclusion that it is one of the Divine laws of life to put our individual prolongation of it in our own power, subject always to his sovereign will. But his plan and principle seem to be, to leave it to us to curtail or protract our stay on earth according to the care we may choose to take of it, and to the habits that are favourable or inimicable to it. He has connected it more especially with our self-government; and, by the first command he gave, has pointed out to us on what this should be chiefly exercised. Longevity is more connected with simple and temperate diet, and with that self-regulation which, in the daily opportunities of indulgence, and in the possession of the procuring means, we are least disposed to practise than we are aware of or like to suppose; yet daily full habits of feeding are not favourable to durable life. But careful diet, in a wisely-regulated quantity, though one of the talismans of long life, is not the only one. All other habits should be directed to the same end; and this will require much selecting judgment and determining resolution; for the customs of society have been adopted and are in full practice without any reference to it, and therefore are in many points incompatible with it. But they are needlessly so as to the enjoyment of life, whatever other purposes they may answer; for those gratifications which most favour continuous vitality will be found in their course more pleasurable than such as invade it. What injures the functions of life hurts the spirits and the

**"Oh happy, blessed, and regular life! how worthy art thou of our esteem! How much dost thou deserve to be preferred before thy contrary !"-Cornaro, p. 49. "A good regimen is necessary for the prolonging our days, and it consists in two things: first, in taking care of the quality, and, secondly, of the quantity, so as to eat and drink nothing that offends the stomach, nor any more than what we can easily digest. Our experience ought to be the guide in these two things."-Ib., 72.

"It is the will of our Creator that we should attain to a long life. He has appointed man to this, because, in his old age, he will be freed from the bitter fruits that were produced by sense, and may enjoy the good effects of his reason. He then bids farewell to his vices, is no longer a slave to the devil, and finds himself in a better condition to provide for the salvation of his soul."-Ib., ch. 3.

temper, brings on lassitude or pain, and fixes corroding diseases, as well as occasions the more rapidly-destructive ones, or promotes their fatality. Hence we are our own worst enemies in this point, and are every day rousing the evil agencies into action upon us, to accelerate that mortality which we complain of, yet will exert no due skill, and care, and selfcoercion to avert. But if, from the desire of present gratification, as it occurs, we will not take this trouble, nor study the subject as carefully as we attend to many far less important things, we are the authors of those early abbreviations of our life which we so much lament and are saddened by.

For the first portion of our existence, we are at the mercy very much of our parents and nurses. They must learn more correctly the laws and causes on which infant and younger life depend; and if they were to make this an important branch of their intellectual attention, and would adapt their own habits and mind to guard and cherish, with enlightened judgment, the vital principles of their newborn generation, the mortality of this period of life would be very considerably diminished. It is lessening already; and the same moral feeling and parental improvements which have produced this melioration are pledges that it will soon be much more extended and more certainly assured.

But when we have ourselves attained that power of observation and thought which grows rapidly within us as we pass from youth to manhood, the springs of health and life are then under our command as far as human judgment can effect them. We then become responsible for the prolongation of our existence in all those things within our power by which it may be shortened or enlarged. If we will not take the trouble to learn and mark what actions, indulgences, or habits tend to abridge or promote it, but choose to walk through life in a wilful ignorance on the subject, which we suffer ourselves to remain in, on any point that is important or deeply interesting to us, we are the authors of that brevity of life which we have brought upon ourselves. The Creator has enabled us to trace his laws concerning it, if we will apply the same care and impartiality in discovering them as thousands are exercising in their daily professions and in the various departments of natural science. It is the Divine plan to leave our longevity here in our own power to the same extent in which he has given us room and license to improve

in so many other worldly comforts. All his counsels and precepts tend to promote this blessing to us on this earth, as well as to prepare us for our hereafter; and the more steadily we follow his rules, and increase in our virtues and piety, the longer will our vitality and all its comforts be preserved and protracted to us. Perhaps we do not sufficiently feel the value of our present life, nor educe those benefits from it which will be of inestimable importance to us hereafter, and which our present scenes can be made to yield. To live for this life only when we must pass into another is so repugnant to the dictates of sound judgment, that we may suppose that, as the intellect and knowledge of society enlarge and become more correct, a less erroneous system of living will be gradually and more generally adopted, which will suit alike our positions both in this world and in the next.*

LETTER XXVI.

Dotage and Disability of Mind or Body no necessary Companion o Longevity. Continuity of Existence anywhere can be no Prejudice to an Immortal Soul.-The Divine Plan of Human Life and Revela tion is founded on its being Immortal and Improvable.

MY DEAR SON,

Having taken this varied survey of the more prominen facts which have been collected and recorded on the subjec of long life in man, let us pursue a few of the rational trains of thought to which they invite us. They seem to warrant the following conclusions :

:

Longevity, to one century of duration in many, and to portions of a second in some, has been an established law of human nature from the deluge to the present hour, in all climates, regions, and states of society, though varying in the

*One curious fact of nature's removing blindness in old age deserves commemoration. "Mrs. Wade, wife of T. Wade, farmer, of Whepsted, now in her eighty-fifth year, after being blind upward of twenty-eight years, has had her sight restored within the last few weeks, without the attendance of a surgeon, or taking any medicine whatever."-Standard, November 24 1836.

number of the long-living individuals, and in their proportion to the rest of their contemporaries.

It has been enjoyed by so many in full and continued health, with so many bodily as well as mental gratifications-with so much active industry and usefulness-with the senses so unimpaired with walking power and with undiminished intellect, that it must be deemed a desirable good—a benefit to be sought for and valued a blessing to be gratefully received. Disability of body is no necessary consequence of it. All the stages of life after manhood are attended with a diminution of manly strength, as well as extreme old age, and with several bodily infirmities; but infirmity is not unhappiness, nor even discomfort, as I personally know, and as thousands of old men will declare.*

Dotage, loss of memory, imbecility, or defect of mental powers, is no necessary or natural companion of longevity. Neither of these arises from any decay in the mind. That remains in its internal self what it was when advancing into the senility of its earthly years; and all the altered phenomena which it may in. any exhibit arise from bodily causes and changes-from organical or functional diseases-from ossifications, aneurisms, congestions of blood-watery effusions, lesions of parts or vessels indurations, or other alterations of substance injurious to the nerves-inflammation or paralysis of some of their ramifications-ganglious or fibrous reticulations, or other causes by which the communication of the mind with the external world, its power over its sensorial organs, or its use of those of speech, or the connexion between these and its thoughts, is prevented or interrupted. In these cases the mind of the individual becomes confined to itself, and is as much withdrawn from the perception of others as a prisoner fastened in a dungeon becomes lost to society, and is no longer visible by it. Its concern with this world is then terminated. It has only to await its passage into the next; and to

* Another instance of efficient longevity has just occurred. "On 27th January, 1837, died at Kennington the oldest inhabitant of Kent, at the age of one hundred and eight. She was born there on 29th September, 1728; her parents were labouring people. In 1750 she married. Her faculties were unimpaired to the last. She could narrate events which happened as far back as 1747 with surprising accuracy; and her eyesight was so good that it never required the aid of spectacles. During all her life she abstained from spirituous liquors, indulging only in tea."--Kentish Herald, 1837.