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And here I pledge you my word, Dolorosus, that to every one of these statements I might append, as Miss Edgeworth does to every particularly tough story, "N.B. This is a fact."
You are possibly aware, my dear Dolorosus, for I remember that you were destined by your parents for the physician of your native seaside village, until you found a more congenial avocation in curing mackerel, that the ancient medals represented the goddess Hygeia with a serpent three times as large as that carried by Aesculapius, to denote the superiority of hygiene to medicine, prevention to cure.
Dolorosus, rather than have a child of mine die, as I have recently heard of a child's dying, insane from sheer overwork, and raving of algebra, I would have her come no nearer to the splendors of science than the man in the French play, who brings away from school only the general impression that two and two make five for a creditor and three for a debtor.
Would it not be better, my dear Dolorosus, to say instead, "Life is noble and immortal; God is good; we must obey his plain laws, or accept the beneficent penalties"? The rise and fall of health are no more accidental than the rise and fall of indigo; and it is the duty of those concerned in either commodity to keep their eyes open, and learn the business intelligently.
Fortunately for Angelina and the junior members of the house of Dolorosus, you are not now directly dependent upon Boston regulations. I mention them only because they represent a contest which is inevitable in every large town in the United States where the public-school system is sufficiently perfected to be dangerous.
Is it not possible to impress upon your mind the changes which "modern improvements" are bringing upon us? Now, on the other hand, every whiff lingers persistently beside the domestic altar, and betrays to the youngest child, next day, the parental weakness. For the sake of family example, Dolorosus, correct this state of things, and put in a ventilator.
But you, Dolorosus, you, to whom God gave youth and health, and who might have kept them, the one long and the other perchance always, but who never loved them, nor reverenced them, nor cherished them, only coined them into money till they were all gone, and even the ill-gotten treasure fell from your debilitated hands, you, who shunned the sunshine as if it were sin, and called all innocent recreation time wasted, you, who staid under ground in your goldmine, like the sightless fishes of the Mammoth Cave, till you were as blind and unjoyous as they, what plea have you to make, what shelter to claim, except that charity which suffereth long and is kind?
Because Socrates taught that a boy who has learned to speak is not too small for the sciences, because Tiberius delivered his father's funeral oration at the age of nine, and Marcus Aurelius put on the philosophic gown at twelve, and Cicero wrote a treatise on the art of speaking at thirteen, because Lipsius is said to have composed a work the day he was born, meaning, say the commentators, that he began a new life at the age of ten, because the learned Licetus, who was brought into the world so feeble as to be baked up to maturity in an oven, sent forth from that receptacle, like a loaf of bread, a treatise called "Gonopsychanthropologia," is it, therefore, indispensably necessary, Dolorosus, that all your pale little offspring shall imitate these?
From seven to nine, two hours of study; immediately after which all retire for the night, and lights in the sleeping apartments must be extinguished at half past nine." You have summed up the total already, Dolorosus; I see it on your lips; nine hours and a quarter of study, and one solitary hour for exercise, not counting those inexplicable "short intervals which cannot easily be explained!"
Maupertuis went farther, and proposed to keep the body covered with pitch for this purpose: conceive, Dolorosus, of spending threescore years and ten in a garment of tar, without even the ornament of feathers, sitting tranquilly in our chairs, waiting for longevity! In more recent times, I can remember only Dr. Darwin as an advocate of sedentary living.
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