she had learned to suit her occupations to
every gradation of the measure of capacity she possessed. "I never," she
said, "afford a moment of a healthy day to transcribe, or put stops, or
cross _t_'s or dot my _i_'s. So that I find the lowest stage of my
understanding may be turned to some account, and save better days for
better things. I have learned from it also to avoid procrastination, and
that idleness which often attends unbroken health."

Baxter, one of the most voluminous of English writers, was an invalid.
After speaking of his multifarious labors as pastor, preacher, and also
surgeon to the poor in general, he says these were but his relaxation;
his writing was his chief labor, which went slowly on, for he had no
amanuensis, and his weakness took up so much of his time. "All the pains
that my infirmities ever brought on me," he adds, "were never half so
grievous and afflictive as the unavoidable loss of time which they
occasioned. I could not bear, through the weakness of my stomach, to
rise before seven, and afterwards not till much later; and some
infirmities I labored under made it above an hour before I could be
dressed. An hour I must have of necessity to walk before dinner, and
another before supper, and after supper I could seldom study." He is
described as one of the most diseased men that ever reached the full
limit of human life, entering upon mature life diseased and sore from
head to foot, and with the symptoms of old age. His "Saint's Rest" was
written as his meditation in a severe illness, and after he had been
given up by his physicians.

Lindley Murray commenced his work as a grammarian, and his other
writings, after disease had fixed upon his declining years. Having
successively engaged in the practice of law, and in mercantile pursuits,
and having retired from the latter with some property, he fell into
ill-health, which compelled him to go abroad, and kept him an exile
through the remainder of his long life. The disease with which he was
afflicted was a weakness in the lower limbs, which precluded him from
walking, and, after a time, from taking any exercise whatever. He was
thus imprisoned, as it were, in a country-seat, near York, in England;
and here he commenced those literary labors, which, so far from being
forbidden by his illness, did much to alleviate his sufferings. He says:
"In the course of my literary labors, I found that the mental exercise
which accompanied them was not a l