n not slowly from those of the body to the mind; exercise the
latter night and day. The mind is nourished at a cheap rate; neither
cold nor heat, nor age itself, can interrupt this exercise; give
therefore all your cares to a possession which ameliorates even in its
old age!"

An ingenious writer has observed, that "a garden just accommodates
itself to the perambulations of a scholar, who would perhaps rather wish
his walks abridged than extended." There is a good characteristic
account of the mode in which the Literati may take exercise, in Pope's
Letters. "I, like a poor squirrel, am continually in motion indeed, but
it is but a cage of three foot! my little excursions are like those of a
shopkeeper, who walks every day a mile or two before his own door, but
minds his business all the while." A turn or two in a garden will often
very happily close a fine period, mature an unripened thought, and raise
up fresh associations, whenever the mind, like the body, becomes rigid
by preserving the same posture. Buffon often quitted the old tower he
studied in, which was placed in the midst of his garden, for a walk in
it. Evelyn loved "books and a garden."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: The same anecdote is related of Dr. Johnson, who once
being at a club where other literary men were indulging in jests, upon
the entry of a new visitor exclaimed, "Let us be grave--here is a fool
coming."]

PORTRAITS OF AUTHORS.

With the ancients, it was undoubtedly a custom to place the portraits of
authors before their works. Martial's 186th epigram of his fourteenth
book is a mere play on words, concerning a little volume containing the
works of Virgil, and which had his portrait prefixed to it. The volume
and the characters must have been very diminutive.

_Quam brevis immensum cepit membrana Maronem!
Ipsius Vultus prima tabella gerit._

Martial is not the only writer who takes notice of the ancients
prefixing portraits to the works of authors. Seneca, in his ninth
chapter on the Tranquillity of the Soul, complains of many of the
luxurious great, who, like so many of our own collectors, possessed
libraries as they did their estates and equipages. "It is melancholy to
observe how the portraits of men of genius, and the works of their
divine intelligence, are used only as the luxury and the ornaments of
walls."

Pliny has nearly the same observation, _lib._ xxxv. _cap._ 2. He
remarks, that the custom was rather modern