exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and
unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school
wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity
of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a
perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein,
neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in
breath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am,
without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together:

"Vires ultra sorternque senectae."

["Beyond the strength and lot of age."--AEneid, vi. 114.]

No season is enemy to me but the parching heat of a scorching sun; for
the umbrellas made use of in Italy, ever since the time of the ancient
Romans, more burden a man's arm than they relieve his head. I would fain
know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of
luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as
Xenophon reports they did. I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, as
well as ducks do. The change of air and climate never touches me; every
sky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breed
within myself, and those are not so frequent in travel. I am hard to be
got out, but being once upon the road, I hold out as well as the best.
I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous
to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbour, as for
the longest voyage. I have learned to travel after the Spanish fashion,
and to make but one stage of a great many miles; and in excessive heats
I always travel by night, from sun set to sunrise. The other method of
baiting by the way, in haste and hurry to gobble up a dinner, is,
especially in short days, very inconvenient. My horses perform the