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. He likewise took a mall, and after having hollowed the
handle, and that part which strikes the ball, inclosed in them several
drugs after the same manner as in the ball itself.

16. He then ordered the sultan who was his patient, to exercise himself
early in the morning with these rightly prepared instruments, till such
time as he should sweat; when, as the story goes, the virtue of the
medicaments perspiring through the wood, had so good an influence on the
sultan's constitution, that they cured him of an indisposition which all
the compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able to remove.

17. This eastern allegory is finely contrived to shew us how beneficial