have been difficult to find a more eligible companion in such a strife, and perhaps no knight errant was ever so well suited. It is gratifying to know that his noble master was not unmindful of his services, and that Charles II. behaved better to him for his fidelity than he did to many of those who served him and his father with such heroic and unselfish loyalty. He was made one of the yeomen of the king's guard, and when the Earl of Bath was created governor of the citadel of Plymouth, Payne was made a gunner there. "His picture used to stand in the great hall at Stowe, in the county of Cornwall, and is now removed to Penheale, now the seat of the Granville family." At his death the floor of the apartment was taken up to remove his enormous remains. As he died in 1691, he attained for his size, a very fair age.

The fat Prussian boy, Hermanes Bras, shown at Bartholomew's fair in 1819 exhibited this peculiarity, that he began to get "amazingly lusty" at six months of age, and when he was fifteen months old he was nearly eight stone weight. This ponderous juvenile grew so steadily that when he was eighteen years old he was very nearly thirty stone weight. He was then nearly six feet high and in the girth of his arm and leg rivalled Lambert, the calf of his leg being nearly three feet round and his arm two feet; still seeing that he was as tall as Lambert and quite seventeen stone lighter, there must have been a vast difference in the frame of the two men. He is described as being very active" as active as a man of the common size," which is utterly incredible, fond of music, a fair performer on the violin, and able to converse in German, French, and Dutch, with fluency. The reader

will possibly think it not so very remarkable that a man should be able to speak his native tongue.

If the reader should ever find himself getting very fat, steadily dilating into that semblance of an oblate spheroid which was once the distinguishing beauty of the burghers of Manhattan, it may be some comfort to him to know that there are means of reducing himself to natural compass if he will only use them. Mr. Wadd in his amusing work * mentions one man only five feet high, and yet twenty-three stone weight, who in six months brought down his weight more than five stone, and another who being obliged from a sudden attack of poverty to enter the workhouse, had all the trouble of reducing his weight taken off his hands and so effectually performed for him, “that from being as corpulent a person as ever I saw, he had become altogether as thin." Another corpulent person who lived in a garrison town, which was taken by the French, was by them shut up in prison, possibly because they did not know what else to do with him, and at the lapse of twenty years was found alive and well, being quite freed from any burthen of fat, so that the process here was almost as effectual as in the workhouse. Dr. Gregory reduced a patient eight stone by putting him on a diet of brown bread and tea with apples, he also took a pint of port or sherry every day.

Avicenna, who was a very practical man though a quack, used to recommend fat patients to take a pound of oil of violets mixed with melted beef suet; this took away their appetites he said (I should think it

* Comments on Corpulency; Lineaments of Leanness, &c., by William Wadd, Esq.

did). Other authors have recommended the german girdle of emptiness, the Elixir Proprietatis, pills made of ashes of cray-fish, sponge, and pith of sweet briar, which must have been very efficacious, and several others on which Mr. Wadd dilates with a grim humour that is perfectly irresistible. One stout gentleman found that with plenty of animal food his fat manifested no change, but a nervous state under which he suffered got decidedly worse, then after two or three freaks, such as living on nuts, he really succeeded by means of a vegetable diet, in bringing himself down nearly two stone in twenty-one days, when a jollification upset everything, and vitiated all the results.

The real secret of failure in most cases is that men won't starve themselves a sufficiently long time. In general they are abstemious, but very few men can stand absolute starvation for a long time. They will do anything but the one thing which is absolutely necessary, go without food. A fat sportsman consulted his surgeon as to what he should do to get thin: "Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut," "Poh! nonsense,"

was the

very

matter of fact advice.

said the refractory patient, "that won't do for me; "give me something to take!"

Here then are several variations which might very easily have been inherited and turned into species, and if the reader will go through Lawrence on Man, Graves's Studies in Physiology, and a few other authorities, he will be able to add to the list; but I don't think that even then he will find any which have become hereditary, a fact which I leave the followers of Mr. Darwin to solve as they best can.

CHAPTER XIII.

LIFE OF MEN OF GENIUS.

"The proper study of mankind is man."

IN conformity with the plan already spoken of in the chapter on the laws of life, I now proceed to place before the reader a sketch of the principal results in the human frame from great development of the brain. So far as seemed compatible with a careful and clear outline of these results I have abridged or compressed them to the utmost extent, so much so that I am afraid I have rather erred on the side of incompleteness than redundancy. Even now they may appear tedious and overloaded-still as the conclusions to which they seemed to lead startled and interested me, I am not without hopes that they may interest the reader. If he finds nothing new he may yet be led to reflect upon the agency of the law which seems to operate so incessantly against the over-accumulation of genius and wealth, and to cause the stream of power and riches to flow back to the hands of dull mediocrity; to watch the cyclical operations of the vital force regulating at once the simplest functions of life and the work of the mightier powers of intellect; prescribing at one time the limits of fatigue or the digestion and at another controlling by the extinction of a family the growth of a power which would reduce the rest of the race to utter slavery-for I think it

is impossible to deny that such must have been the case had the children of great conquerors continued the work of their forefathers, and the sons of great statesmen and speculators successively added to the

vast

accumulations of those who founded their

families.

The selection of the names intended to exemplify the "marks of genius" may appear arbitrary. I can only plead in excuse that the silence of biographers on points I sought to elucidate, compelled me often to limit myself to those histories which yielded information on such topics, and that if I have omitted many celebrated names it was from no wish to set up any novel standard of merit, but because I thought the list already long enough, and that I could add nothing likely to repay the trouble of reading.

After going through numerous biographies the first thing I made out was, that it is impossible to be a genius and a big man at the same time. The heaven-born spark, the divine afflatus, must not be lodged in too ample a tenement. It is not impossible to find great ability and energy established in a bulky habitation of flesh and blood, but then there are so often drawbacks attendant upon this. Thus Ariosto, Johnson, and Scott were all three burly fellows, but Johnson shook and rolled about like a huge jelly-fish; Scott was paralysed from childhood, and Ariosto was ill made. Caius Paterculus says that Cæsar exceeded his fellow citizens in stature, but then he seems to have had no hair on his skin and very little on his head. Constantine was of large stature. Alfred the Great was tall and stout, but

*Gibbon : Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. iii. p. 148.