Ramazzini, the most competent of Cornaro's
commentators, very judiciously observes, "It
would be a needless severity to prescribe similar
rules to persons in the enjoyment of perfect
health; indeed, such a regimen would be
anything but generally beneficial. It may be all
very well to impose an excessively spare diet
upon elderly men, after they have spent the
best part of their lives in the service of the
republic; but it is not wise to include young people
in these observations. How could they serve
their prince and their country, either in the army
or in embassies, where they would have to bear
the fatigue of travel? How could a doctor visit
his patients every day? How could an advocate
do his duty to his clients? If any one,"
continues Ramazzini, "were to ask me what
aliments he ought to take, in what quantity, and
at what times, in order to keep himself in health,
I should refer him to his own stomach, which is
doubtless the most likely counsellor to give him
good advice upon such a subject."

Although Cornaro placed temperance before
every other sanitary precaution, he did not
neglect any one of the rest. "I contrive," he says,
"to preserve myself from great cold and from
great heats; I never take violent exercise; I
abstain from sitting up late and from night-
watches; I have never dwelt in places where the
air is unwholesome; and I have always been
equally careful to avoid exposure to high winds
and to burning sunshine."

Moral health is a great promoter of physical
welfare. Cornaro selected, to keep his spiritual
faculties in tune, the two most delightful
exercises of the mind and the heart; namely, the
culture of letters, and beneficence. "I have the
happiness," he says, "of frequently conversing
with learned persons, from whom I obtain fresh
information; I gratify my curiosity with new
publications, and I take pleasure in reperusing
those which I have already dipped into. If I
may be allowed to mention trifles, I will state
that, at the age of eighty-three, the sober life I
lead has maintained my good spirits and clear-
headedness sufficiently to enable me to compose
a comedy which, without the slightest offence to
good morals, is at the same time very diverting."

Such were his intellectual pleasures; his heart
enjoyed others of a still more refined nature. He
had about him eleven grandchildren, in whose
sports he took an interest; and he lived in
constant intercourse with his tenants, whom he had
provided with a livelihood by giving them waste
lands and marshes to drain and bring into
cultivation. He had also borne his part in the
embellishment and fortification of Venice. "This
pleasure," he says, "innocently flatters my
vanity when I call to mind that I have furnished
my countrymen with the means of fortifying
their port; that these works will endure for a
great number of centuries; that they will
contribute to render Venice a famous republic, a
rich and incomparable city, and will serve to
perpetuate her noble title of Queen of the Sea."

Finally, in addition to these aids to longevity,
namely, temperance, precautions against heat and
cold, mental occupation, and gratified affections,
there was another which acted unknown to
Cornaro, and which was not on that account the
less efficacious. This stimulus was the secret
pleasure of wrestling with nature, and gaining
the victory—of living on, in spite of a weakly
constitution and the doctors' discouraging
predictions of owing continued life to himself
alone, to his own will and his own prudence—
and of reckoning every additional day of
existence as an additional triumph for his own
proper self-complacency.

Consequently, he is never tired of boasting of
"his beautiful life," and "the victory he has
gained;" he regards with delighted admiration
the circumstance of his own advanced and still
advancing age. He exclaims, "What I am
about to state will appear impossible, or at
least difficult, to believe; nevertheless, nothing
is more true; it is a fact well known to many
people, and worthy of the admiration of
posterity. I have attained my ninety-fifth year, and
I find myself in good health and spirits, and as
merry as if I were only five-and-twenty.
Nothing," he remarks, "is more advantageous
for a man than to live a long while," a maxim
which few will dispute, although his reasons are
curious: "If you are a cardinal, you will have
a better chance of becoming pope; if you have
consideration in the State, you may possibly
become its chief; if you are learned or excel in
any art, you will advance to still higher
excellence." But he also cites motives of a more
disinterested character: "What gives me the
greatest pleasure is to observe that age and
experience are able to make a man more learned
than the schools can do. It is impossible to fix
the value of ten years of a healthy life at an age
when a man is enjoying the plenitude of his
reasoning faculties at the same time that he
profits by his past experience. To speak only of
the sciences, it is certain that the best books we
have were composed during those ten years
which are at once the terror and the scorn of
debauchees; it is certain that the mind is
perfected as the body ages. The arts and sciences
would have suffered greatly if the lives of all
the able men who have cultivated them had been
abridged by those ten years."

It is not easy to deny Cornaro's proposition,
that the mental faculties are perfected as the
body advances in age. Every age has its own
peculiar intellectual strength. There are
certain discoveries which may be made by a young
man; there are others which can be made only
by men who are ripe in years. Galileo discovered
at eighteen or twenty the equal duration of the
oscillations of the pendulum. Happening to be
one day in the cathedral of Pisa, he remarked
the regulated and periodical motion of a lamp
suspended from the roof of the knave. He
noticed the equal duration of its oscillations, and
confirmed the fact by repeated experiments. He
at once comprehended that this phenomenon
might be employed to serve as an exact measure
of time. The idea never escaped his memory,
and he made use of it, fifty years afterwards, for