e widow abated and old age came on, he left off fox-hunting; but a
hare is not yet safe that sits within ten miles of his house.

11. There is no kind of exercise which I would so recommend to my
readers of both sexes as that of riding, as there is none which so much
conduces to health, and is every way accommodated to the body, according
to the idea which I have given of it. Dr. _Sydenham_ is very lavish in
its praise; and if the _English_ reader will see the mechanical effects
of it described at length, he may find them in a book published not many
years since, under the title of _Medicina Gymnastica_.

12. For my own part, when I am in town, for want of these 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 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.

13. 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 exercise, that is written with great erudition: It is there
called the _Skimachia_, or the fighting with a man's own shadow, and
consists in the brandishing of two short sticks grasped in each hand,
and loaded 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.

14. 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 to the public as well
as to themselves.

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.

15. There is a story in the _Arabian Nights Tales_, of a king who had
long languished under an ill habit of body, and had taken abundance of
remedies to no purpose. At length, says the fable, a physician cured him
by the following method: He took an hollow ball of wood, and filled it
with several drugs; after which he closed it up so artificially that
nothing appeared