profession, and who both
worked to excess, had cerebral attacks of a still more decided kind. One
of them, after his recovery, resolved to regulate his work in future, so
that it might never pass the limits of moderation. He is now living, and
in possession of a remarkably clear and richly furnished intellect. The
other, who returned to his old habits, died in two years from softening
of the brain. I am not aware that in these cases there was any other
disease than that produced by an immoderate use of the mental powers.

The health of Sir Walter Scott--we have this on his own testimony--was
uncommonly robust, and there is every reason to believe that his
paralysis was brought on by the excessive labor which resulted from his
pecuniary embarrassments, and that without such excessive mental labor
and anxiety he would have preserved his health much longer. The death of
Byron was due, no doubt, quite as much to habits of dissipation as to
poetical excitement; still it is probable that he would have borne
either of these evil influences if it had not been accompanied by the
other; and that to a man whose way of life was so exhausting as Byron's
was, the addition of constant poetical excitement and hard work in
production, may be said without exaggeration to have killed him. We know
that Scott, with all his facility, had a dread of that kind of
excitement, and withdrew from the poetical arena to avoid it. We know,
too, that the brain of Southey proved ultimately unable to endure the
burden of the tasks he laid upon it.

Difficult as it may be in some instances to ascertain quite accurately
whether an overworked man had perfectly sound bodily health to begin
with, obvious as it may be that in many breakdowns the final failure has
been accelerated by diseases independent of mental work, the facts
remain, that the excessive exercise of the mental powers is injurious to
bodily health and that all intellectual labor proceeds upon a physical
basis. No man can safely forget this, and act as if he were a pure
spirit, superior to physical considerations. Let me then, in other
letters on this subject, direct your attention to the close connection
which exists between intellectual production and the state of the body
and the brain; not with the authority of a physician, but with the
sympathy of a fellow-laborer, who has learned something from his own
experience, and still more from the more varied experience of his
friends.

LETTE