13.  When I was some years younger than I am at present, I used to employ myself in a more laborious diversion, which I learned from a Latin treatise of exercise, that is written with great erudition:  It is there called the Skimachia, or the fighting with a man’s own shadow, and consists in the brandishing of two short sticks grasped in each hand, and loaded with plugs of lead at either end.  This opens the chest, exercises the limbs, and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing, without the blows.

14.  I could wish that several learned men would lay out that time which they employ in controversies, and disputes about nothing, in this method of fighting with their own shadows.  It might conduce very much to evaporate the spleen, which makes them uneasy to the public as well as to themselves.

As I am a compound of soul and body, I consider myself as obliged to a double scheme of duties; and think I have not fulfilled the business of the day when I do not thus employ the one in labour and exercise, as well as the other in study and contemplation.

15.  There is a story in the Arabian Nights Tales, of a king who had long languished under an ill habit of body, and had taken abundance of remedies to no purpose.  At length, says the fable, a physician cured him by the following method:  He took an hollow ball of wood, and filled it with several drugs; after which he closed it up so artificially that nothing appeared.  He likewise took a mall, and after having hollowed the handle, and that part which strikes the ball, inclosed in them several drugs after the same manner as in the ball itself.

16.  He then ordered the sultan who was his patient, to exercise himself early in the morning with these rightly prepared instruments, till such time as he should sweat; when, as the story goes, the virtue of the medicaments perspiring through the wood, had so good an influence on the sultan’s constitution, that they cured him of an indisposition which all the compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able to remove.

17.  This eastern allegory is finely contrived to shew us how beneficial bodily labour is to health, and that exercise is the most effectual physic.  I have described in my hundred and fifteenth paper, from the general structure and mechanism of an human body, how absolutely necessary exercise is for its preservation; I shall in this place recommend another great preservative of health, which in many cases produces the same effects as exercise, and may, in some measure, supply its place, where opportunities of exercise are wanting.

18.  The preservative I am speaking of is temperance, which has those particular advantages above all other means of health, that it may be practised by all ranks and conditions, at any season, or in any place.  It is a kind of regimen into which every man may put himself, without interruption to business, expense of money, or loss of time.  If exercise throws off all superfluities, temperance prevents them:  if exercise clears the vessels, temperance neither satiates nor over-strains them; if exercise raises proper ferments in the humours, and promotes the circulation of the blood, temperance gives nature her full play, and enables her to exert herself in all her force and vigour:  if exercise dissipates a growing distemper, temperance starves it.