ly when the cerebral matter is rapidly destroyed by intellectual
labor--and usually brings on nervousness, the peculiar affliction of the
over-driven mental laborer. This nervousness is Nature's kindly warning,
preserving us, if we attend to it in time, from much more serious
consequences. The best preventive of it, and often the only cure, is
plenty of moderate exercise. The customs of the upper classes in England
happily provide this in the best shape, that of amusement enjoyed in
society, but our middle classes in large towns do not get nearly enough
of it, and the most studious are always strongly tempted to neglect it
altogether.

Men of great imaginative power are commonly addicted to a habit which is
peculiarly dangerous. They work as race-horses work, with the utmost
intensity of effort during short spaces of time, taxing all their
powers whilst the brilliant effort lasts. When Beckford wrote the
wonderful tale "Vathek" in his twentieth year, he did it at a single
sitting, which lasted for three days and two nights, and it cost him a
serious illness. Several of the best poems by Byron were written, if not
quite with equal rapidity, still on the same principle of composition at
white heat. In cases of this kind, Nature provides her own remedy in the
indolence of the imaginative temperament, which leaves large spaces of
time for the action of the recuperative processes. The same law governs
the physical energies of the carnivora, which maintain, or recover,
their capacity for extraordinary effort by intervals of absolute repose.
In its long spaces of mental rest the imaginative temperament recruits
itself by amusement, which in England usually includes physical exercise
of some kind.

This fortunate indolence of men of genius would in most instances ensure
their safety if they were not impelled by necessity to labor beyond the
suggestions of inclination. The exhausted brain never of itself seeks
the additional exhaustion of hard work. You know very well when you are
tired, and at such times the natural man in you asks plainly enough for
rest and recreation. The art is so to arrange our lives that the natural
man may sometimes have his way, and forget, if only for a time, the
labors which lead to weariness--not to that pleasant weariness of the
body which promises soundest sleep, but the distressing fatigue of the
exhausted spirit which is tortured by the importunity of ideas which it
is unable to express, and app