e opportunities, I exercise myself an hour
every morning upon a dumb bell that is placed in a corner of my room, and
pleases me the more because it does everything I require of it in the
most profound silence. My landlady and her daughters are so well
acquainted with my hours of exercise, that they never come into my room
to disturb me whilst I am ringing.

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 exercises that is written with great erudition: it is there
called the [Greek: skiomachia], or the fighting with a man's own shadow,
and consists in the brandishing of two short sticks grasped in each hand,
and loaden 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. 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[103] to the public as well
as to themselves.

To conclude, 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.

L.

FOOTNOTES:

[98] _Particular._ Respect.

[99] _Spleen_, _vapours_. Attacks of depression or melancholy.

[100] _Condition._ Rank.

[101] _Patched._ Decorated.

[102] _Amours._ Courtship.

[103] _Uneasy._ Trying.

NO. 116. FRIDAY, JULY 13

_Vocat ingenti clamore Cithaeron,
Taygetique canes._

VIRG. _Georg._ iii. ver. 43.

The echoing hills and chiding hounds invite.

Those who have searched into human nature observe that nothing so much
shows the nobleness of the soul as that its felicity consists in action.
Every man has such an active principle in him, that he will find out
something to employ himself upon, in whatever place or state of life he
is posted. I have heard of a gentleman who was under close confinement in
the Bastile seven years; during which time he amused himself in
scattering a few small pins about his chamber, gathering them up again,
and placing them in different figures on the arm of a great chair. He
often told his friends afterwa