ple who expect to find that health in medicine,
which possibly might be found in regimen, in air, exercise, or
serenity of mind.

There is another class amongst us, and that rather numerous, whose
employment is laborious, and whose conduct is irregular. Their time is
divided between hard working, and hard drinking, and both by a fire. It
is no uncommon thing to see one of these, at forty, wear the aspect of
sixty, and finish a life of violence at fifty, which the hand of
prudence would have directed to eighty.

The strength of a kingdom consists in the multitude of its inhabitants;
success in trade depends upon the manufacturer; the support and
direction of a family, upon the head of it. When this useful part of
mankind, therefore, are cut off in the active part of life, the
community sustains a loss, whether we take the matter in a national, a
commercial, or a private view.

We have a third class, who shun the rock upon which these last fall, but
wreck upon another; they run upon scylla though they have missed
charybdis; they escape the liquid destruction, but split upon the solid.
These are proficients in good eating; adepts in culling of delicacies,
and the modes of dressing them. Matters of the whole art of cookery;
each carries a kitchen in his head. Thus an excellent constitution may
be stabbed by the spit. Nature never designed us to live well, and
continue well; the stomach is too weak a vessel to be richly and deeply
laden. Perhaps more injury is done by eating than by drinking; one is a
secret, the other an open enemy: the secret is always supposed the most
dangerous. Drinking attacks by assault, but eating by sap: luxury is
seldom visited by old age. The best antidote yet discovered against this
kind of slow poison is exercise; but the advantages of elevation, air,
and water, on one hand, and disadvantages of crowd, smoke, and effluvia
on the other, are trifles compared to intemperance.

We have a fourth class, and with these I shall shut up the clock. If
this valuable machine comes finished from the hand of nature; if the
rough blasts of fortune only attack the outward case, without affecting
the internal works, and if reason conduces the piece, it may move on,
with a calm, steady, and uninterrupted pace to a great extent of years,
'till time only annihilates the motion.

I personally know amongst us a Mrs. Dallaway, aged near 90; George
Davis, 85; John Baddally, Esq; and his two brothers, all between 8