THE ABBE MOIGNO.


I am grateful to you for thinking of me in your generous enquiry
about the best conditions of literary and scientific composition. I
can hardly offer myself as an example, because my constitution is
rather too exceptional, but my experience may have some degree of
usefulness. I have already published a hundred and fifty volumes,
small and great. I scarcely ever leave my writing table. I never take
a walk, nor recreation, even after meals; and yet have not felt any
head-ache, constipation, or any derangement in the urinary organs. I
have never had occasion to have recourse to stimulants, coffee,
alcohol, tobacco, &c., in order to work, or to obtain clearness of
mind. On the contrary, stimulants give rise in my case to abnormal
vibrations in the brain, which are adverse to its quick and regular
working.

Several times in my life I fell into the habit of taking snuff. It is
a fatal habit, dirty to begin with, since it puts a cautery to the
nose, filth in the pocket, is extremely unwholesome; for he who takes
snuff finds his nose stopped up every morning, his breathing
difficult, his voice harsh and snuffling, because the action of
tobacco consists in drawing the humours to the brain; fatal, at last,
because the use of snuff weakens and destroys, by degrees, the memory.
This last effect is fully proved by my own professional experiences,
and that of many others.

I learned twelve foreign languages by the method I published in my
"_Latin for all;_" that is to say, I draw up the catalogue of