weakness.  For the sake of family example, Dolorosus, correct this state of things, and put in a ventilator.  Our natures will not adapt themselves to this abstinence from fresh air, until Providence shall fit us up with new bodies, having no lungs in them.  Did you ever hear of Dr. Lyne, the eccentric Irish physician?  Dr. Lyne held that no house was wholesome, unless a dog could get in under every door and a bird fly out at every window.  He even went so far as to build his house with the usual number of windows, and no glass in the sashes; he lived in that house for fifty years, reared a large family there, and no death ever occurred in it.  He himself died away from home, of small-pox, at eighty; his son immediately glazed all the windows of the house, and several of the family died within the first year of the alteration.  The story sounds apocryphal, I own, though I did not get it from Sir Jonah Barrington, but somewhere in the scarcely less amusing pages of Sir John Sinclair.  I will not advise you, my unfortunate sufferer, to break every pane of glass in your domicile, though I have no doubt that Nathaniel and his boy-companions would enter with enthusiasm into the process; I am not fond of extremes; but you certainly might go so far as to take the nails out of my bed-room windows, and yet keep a good deal this side the Lyne.

I hardly dare go on to speak of exercise, lest I should share the reproach of that ancient rhetorician who,—­as related by Plutarch, in his Aphorisms,—­after delivering an oration in praise of Hercules, was startled by the satirical inquiry from his audience, whether any one had ever dispraised Hercules.  As with Hercules, so with the physical activity he represents,—­no one dispraises, if few practise it.  Even the disagreement of doctors has brought out but little skepticism on this point.  Cardan, it is true, in his treatise, “Plantae cur Animalibus diuturniores,” maintained that trees lived longer than men because they never stirred from their places.  Exercise, he held, increases transpiration; transpiration shortens life; to live long, then, we need only remain perfectly still.  Lord Bacon fell in with this fancy, and advised “oily unctions,” to prevent perspiration.  Maupertuis went farther, and proposed to keep the body covered with pitch for this purpose:  conceive, Dolorosus, of spending threescore years and ten in a garment of tar, without even the ornament of feathers, sitting tranquilly in our chairs, waiting for longevity!  In more recent times, I can remember only Dr. Darwin as an advocate of sedentary living.  He attempted to show its advantages by the healthy longevity attained by quiet old ladies in country-towns.  But this is questioned by his critic, Dr. Beddoes, who admits the longevity, but denies the healthiness; he maintains that the old ladies are taking some new medicine every day,—­at least, if they have a physician who understands his business.