The Cecil Whig. [volume] (Elkton, Md.) 1841-current, 1879-06-14
LYING IN BED.

Taking an occasional day in bed simply
on account of indiSposition, is 4 very sim
pie and rudimentary notion of this glori-
Gus institution. Bed is the natural dom
icile of every man:
In bed we laugh. in bed we cry:
And born in bed, in bed we die
Bavard. the French Psychologist. main
tanned that man is an animal who exer-
cises the thinking faculty best in hori-
zontal position. Thus there are high ar
tistic, social, and intellectual uses con-
nected with the occasional day in bed
which imperatively claim discussion.
Brindley, the great engineer. when he
was fairly bothered and puzzled by some
tough problem. always betook himself to
bed until he had solved it, Most people
have Il great kindness for Lord Melbourne,
who under the af1cctation of frivolity, used
to get up Hebrew and the Fathers. and
mperturbable good humor to bear with
his wife, Lady Caroline, while the pref
ty Byron-struck termagant used to smash
the drawning-room furniture. His init
mate friends would find the Premier calm
ly taking breakfast in bed, with letters
and dispatches strewed all over the coun-
terpane. The poets have been terrible
fellows to get out of bed. Perhaps it is
because the visions of the day and of the
night sweetly intermingle. The poet
Thomson cultivated laziness as a fine art.
and thought out his poems in bed. Pope
was a still worse fellow. When he had
fit of inspiration on him. he would keep
the servants running about for him. all
through the night. He made amends to
them by the righteousness of his walls.
Let us analyze this lying i'll bed little
further maintain that in the mere fact
of lying in bed there is something healthy
and recuperative to the system. The
wheels of life are oiled and cased The
proper and legitimate purpose of stop
ping i'll bed is to so to sleep. There
is nothing like sleep. There is no tonic
OF medicine in the whole world like sleep.
The more sleep the brain gets, the better
does the brain work. All great brain
workers have been great sleepers. Sir
Walter Scott could never do with less than
ten hours. \ fool may want eight hours.
As George Ill. said. but a philosopher
wants nine. The men who have been the
greatest generals are the men who could
sleep at will. Thus it was with both Wei
lington and Napoleon. The greatest
speakers in the House of Commons have
been the men who could go to sleep there
as much as they liked. This explained
the iuvenility of the aged Palmerston
Sleep" says the Greek proverb lis
the medicine for every disease IF he
sleep, he will do we'll A friend told me
that he treated himself for fever: he
went to bed. with large pitcher of lemon
AIDE by his side; he drank and slept, slept
and drank. till he slept himself well again.
When you take to your bed. get all the
sleep you can out of your hedStead. even
although. to quote Dick Swiveller's say
ing, you have to pay for double beddcd
room, contessing that you have taken a
most unreasonable amount of sleep out
of a single bed. You will be banking a
whole store of recuperative energy. Even
if you can not sleep, still keep to your
hnI 'rhnrn l.. l..
than that you should get up directly you
are awake. If it is the early riser who
catches the worm. the worm is a great
idiot in rising still earlier i'll order to he
caught. If you do not get sleep by lying
i'll bed. you get rest. You secure the fall
low ground which will hereafter produce
good harvest. Sleep is of course. the
proper employment for bed. bat if You
don't sleep you can lie still and read
don't believe that the man who gets up
really learns or does more than the man
who lies in bed. If for moment the
writer may be egotistical, some of the
hardest work which he has ever done has
been from the early dawn till after a
breakfast in bed. OF all sleep in the
world there is none so good as what you
get, i'll the way of treasure-trove, after
the usual time of waking when, in point
of fact, you have given up the expecta-
ton of getting any more sleep. As for
being called, as the saying goes. that
is simply a relic Of the barbarism Of our
ancestors. | should quarrel with any
man who presumed to "call me- One
of the main beauties of an occasional dav
i'll bed is that you get an extra stock of
sleep. which goes to the credit side your
sanitary account.