. Alexander Bayne, to prepare his
lectures, studied fourteen hours a-day for eight months successively,
and wrote 1,600 sheets. Such intense application, which, however, not
greatly exceeds that of many authors, brought on the bodily complaints
he has minutely described, with "all the dispiriting symptoms of a
nervous illness, commonly called vapours, or lowness of spirits."
Bayne, who was of an athletic temperament, imagined he had not paid
attention to his diet, to the lowness of his desk, and his habit of
sitting with a particular compression of the body; in future all these
were to be avoided. He prolonged his life for five years, and,
perhaps, was still flattering his hopes of sharing one day in the
literary celebrity of his friends, when, to use his words, "the same
illness made a fierce attack upon me again, and has kept me in a very
bad state of inactivity and disrelish of all my ordinary amusements:"
those _amusements_ were his serious _studies_. There is a fascination
in literary labour: the student feeds on magical drugs; to withdraw
him from them requires nothing less than that greater magic which
could break his own spells. A few months after this letter was written
Bayne died on the way to Bath, a martyr to his studies.

The excessive labour on a voluminous work, which occupies a long life,
leaves the student with a broken constitution, and his sight decayed
or lost. The most admirable observer of mankind, and the truest
painter of the human heart, declares, "The corruptible body presseth
down the soul, and the earthy tabernacle weigheth down the _mind that
museth on many things_." Of this class was old Randle Cotgrave, the
curious collector of the most copious dictionary of old French and old
English words and phrases. The work is the only treasury of our
genuine idiom. Even this labour of the lexicographer, so copious and
so elaborate, must have been projected with rapture, and pursued with
pleasure, till, in the progress, "the mind was musing on many things."
Then came the melancholy doubt, that drops mildew from its enveloping
wings over the voluminous labour of a laborious author, whether he be
wisely consuming his days, and not perpetually neglecting some higher
duties or some happier amusements. Still the enchanted delver sighs,
and strikes on in the glimmering mine of hope. If he live to complete
the great labour, it is, perhaps, reserved for the applause of the
next age; for, as our great lexicogr