Literary men may be included in Ramazzini’s “Treatise on the Diseases of Artizans.”  ROSSEAU has described the labours of the closet as enervating men, and weakening the constitution, while study wears the whole machinery of man, exhausts the spirits, destroys his strength, and renders him pusillanimous.[B] But there is a higher principle which guides us to declare, that men of genius should not excel in “all manly exercises.”  SENECA, whose habits were completely literary, admonishes the man of letters that “Whatever amusement he chooses, he should not slowly return from those of the body to the mind, while he should be exercising the latter night and day.”  Seneca was aware that “to rejoice and excel in all manly exercises,” would in some cases intrude into the habits of a literary man, and sometimes be even ridiculous.  MORTIMER, once a celebrated artist, was tempted by his athletic frame to indulge in frequent violent exercises; and it is not without reason suspected, that habits so unfavourable to thought and study precluded that promising genius from attaining to the maturity of his talents, however he might have succeeded in invigorating his physical powers.

[Footnote A:  Dr. Currie, in his “Life of Burns,” has a passage which may be quoted here:  “Though by nature of an athletic form, Burns had in his constitution the peculiarities and the delicacies that belong to the temperament of genius.  He was liable, from a very early period of life, to that interruption in the process of digestion which arises from deep and anxious thought, and which is sometimes the effect, and sometimes the cause, of depression of spirits.”—­ED.]

[Footnote B:  In the Preface to the “Narcisse.”]

But to our solitude.  So true is it that this love of loneliness is an early passion, that two men of genius of very opposite characters, the one a French wit and the other a French philosopher, have acknowledged that they have felt its influence, and even imagined that they had discovered its cause.  The Abbe DE ST. PIERRE, in his political annals, tells us, “I remember to have heard old SEGRAIS remark, that most young people of both sexes had at one time of their lives, generally about seventeen or eighteen years of age, an inclination to retire from the world.  He maintained this to be a species of melancholy, and humorously called it the small-pox of the mind, because scarce one in a thousand escaped the attack.  I myself have had this distemper, but am not much marked with it.”

But if the youth of genius be apt to retire from the ordinary sports of his mates, he will often substitute for them others, which are the reflections of those favourite studies which are haunting his young imagination, as men in their dreams repeat the conceptions which have habitually interested them.  The amusements of such an idler have often been analogous to his later pursuits.  ARIOSTO, while yet a schoolboy, seems to have been very susceptible of poetry, for