Length of Days
A quaint old recipe for attaining great old age runs thus : ' No pies or cakes, no pains or aches. Must men dig their graves with their teeth ' Mr. Bradbury, a former Governor of Maine, gave the following as 'the secret of length of days when he was standing near the brink of his hundredth year : < Get an incurable ailment in your youth, and nurse it till your death.' A somewhat similar experience— minus the ' nursing '-fell to the lot of the late Pope When ncaring his twentieth year he fell into a long-drawn and painful malady that almost shrivelled up the life m him and threatened to dig him an early grave. Pain drove sleep from his pillow and in long watches of the weary night he wrote in Latin verse : ' Wakeful till latest night, thy limbs in vain Court needful rest ; Yet pain, when charmed by verse Seems half allayed.,' He himself felt that his coffin and grave-clothes should ?oon be ready Yet he lived far past the oi dinar) span of human existence and died at mneU-thrce with Ins great mind clear to the last. And ever through life he found that Ae:.urist diseases here the strongest fence Is the defensive virtue, abstinence.'
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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 32, 6 August 1903, Page 2
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208Length of Days New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 32, 6 August 1903, Page 2
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