MY MAN. A SUM.

I WILL take a man, as Lawrence Sterne
took a solitary captive in a cell. I desire not
to view, however, like the writer of Tristram
Shandy, the iron entering into his soul. I
have nothing to do with his thoughts, his
motives, his feelings, his sympathies. I will
take a man and give him threescore and ten
years to live, and breathe, and act in—a fair
mean, I think.  He shall be robust, laborious,
sober, steady, economical of time, fond if you
will of repeating the fallacious apothegm,
"Time flies," and ever anxious to cut the
wings of Time with the scissors of Industry.

Providence has given my man, you will not
deny, a rope or cable of life composed of
three hundred and sixty-five times twenty-four
hours, forming alternate days and nights
for seventy years. Give me the twenty-four
hours to regulate the daily portion of my
man by, and let us see how many of those
hours necessity, habit, and the customs of the
state of society he is born, and lives, and dies
in, will allow him to turn to useful and profitable
account.

My man must sleep. He shall not be
chuckle-headed, dunder-headed, nightcap-
enamoured. He shall have no occasion, as a
sluggard, to consider the ways of the ant.
"Let the galled jade wince," my man's withers
are unwrung when Doctor Watts hears the
sluggard complain and express his wish to
slumber again. Yet my man shall not observe
the ration of sleep fixed, I believe, by George
the Third, our gracious king, " Six hours for
a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a
fool." He shall be a fool, in one sense at
least, and sleep eight hours per noctem—a
reasonable, decent, honest, hygienic slumber
season. This sum of sleep will amount, in the
course of my man's life, to twenty-four years to
be deducted from the seventy. For twenty-four
mortal years 'shall my man lie between
the sheets, talking to people he never saw,
sitting down to dinners he is never to eat,
remembering minutely things he never knew,
reconciling impossibilities through that system
of dream-philosophy of which only the dream-
master has the key; listening oft times to
ravishing strains of music, of which the
remembrance, as they never were, will come
upon him even when he is awake, and amid
the most ordinary occurrences of life—strains
so sweet, so mysterious, so unearthly, so silent,
yet so sentiently distinct, that they must be, I
think, the tunes the angels play in Heaven
upon the golden harps. Four-and-twenty years,
shall my man doze away in "Bedfordshire."

My man being sober, does not, necessarily,
go to bed nightly in his boots, with a damp
umbrella under his arm, his hat on his head,
and his waterproof paletot on his back; nor,
being cleanly, does he rise in the morning
without washing, shaving, shower-bathing,
and ultimately dressing himself in decent
attire. I will retrench the shower-bath. I
will sink the existence of such things as flesh-
brushes, bear's-grease, bandoline, whisker
pomatum, musk, patchouli, and bergamot.
My man shall be neither a fop nor a sloven.
He shall not spend unnecessary matutinal
minutes in cultivating a moustache, in imparting
an extra curl to a whisker, or tittivating
an imperial. He shall not cut himself
in shaving, and waste clock time in searching
for an old hat; neither shall he wear tight
boots and consume unnecessary half hours in
pulling them on; nor yet shall he have corns
to cut, nor stays to lace. He shall not even
be delayed in his daily toilet by the lack of
shirt or wrist-buttons; for I will give him a
wife, and an accomplished wife—a domestic
wife—who shall be everything he desires,
and attend to his mother-of-pearl wants without
even being asked. Yet my man, though
a model of cleanliness, neat-handedness, and
simplicity, cannot get up, and go to bed, and
dress and undress himself, in less than half an
hour per diem. Ergo, deduct from seventy
years, eighteen months, or one year and a half.

This man of mine must live. Hence, it is
essential that he should exercise, at certain
given periods in each day, his manducatory
organs: in other words, that he should eat.
He is not to be a glutton, or even a gourmand,
wandering furtively all day over town in
quest of truffles, or rising with the lark to
intercept fish-trains laden with Colchester
oysters. Appetites for Strasburgh pies of
goose liver, for elaborate petits plats, for seductive
Rhine wines that sparkle, and, while they
sparkle, overcome, I do not allow him. He
is not to have four courses daily. He shall
dispense with entrées: entremets shall be unknown
to him. He shall not sit for so long