The Atlantic Monthly | Page 7

no influences, climatic or intellectual, which war with longevity. What may be hidden in the future, what results may come from a still wider diffusion of education, we cannot tell, but hitherto nothing but good has come of ever-increasing knowledge.
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We hasten now to inquire concerning the health and years of special classes of literary men: not, indeed, to prove that there is no real war between the mind and the body,--for we consider that point to be already demonstrated,--but rather to show that we need shrink from no field of inquiry, and that from every fresh field will come new evidence of the substantial truth of our position.
We have taken the trouble to ascertain the average age of all the English poets of whom Johnson wrote lives, some fifty or sixty in all. Here are great men and small men, men with immortal names and men whose names were long since forgotten, men of good habits and men whose habits would undermine any constitution, flourishing, too, in a period when human life was certainly far shorter in England than now. And how long did they live? What do you think? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton, struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of the century,--Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay, Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,--all these, with scarcely an exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry, broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have destroyed him early, lingered till sixty-two. Scott, struggling to throw off a mountain-load of debt, endured superhuman labor till more than sixty. Even Byron and Burns, who did not live as men who desired length of days, died scarcely sooner than their generation.
You are not willing, perhaps, to test this question by the longevity of purely literary men. You ask what can be said about the great preachers. You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we could call to mind. Of the age to which most of these attained we had at the outset no idea whatever. In that list were included the men who must figure in every candid account of preaching. The great men of the Reformation, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Knox, were there. That resplendent group which adorned the seventeenth century, and whose names are synonymes for pulpit eloquence, Barrow, South, Jeremy Taylor, and Tillotson, were prominent in it. The milder lights of the last century, Paley, Blair, Robertson, Priestley, were not forgotten. The Catholics were represented by Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdalou?, and Fénelon. The Protestants as truly by Robert Hall and Chalmers, by Wesley and Channing. In short, it was a thoroughly fair list. We then proceeded to ascertain the average life of those included in it. It was just sixty-nine years. And we invite all persons who are wedded to the notion that the saints are always knights of the broken body, to take pen and paper and jot down the name of every remarkable preacher since the year 1500 that they can recall, and add, if they wish, every man in their own vicinity who has risen in learning and talent above the mass of his profession. We will insure the result without any premium. They will produce a list that would delight the heart of a provident director of a life-insurance company. And their average will come as near the old Scripture pattern of threescore years and ten as that of any body of men who have lived since the days of Isaac and Jacob.
If now any one has a lurking doubt