Year: 1869

Here we have the all powerful Saturday Review
against early rising. 1t comes with solid, SEN
slble arguments


The fact is, that, as life becomes more concen-
trated, and its pursuits more eager, short sleep
and early rising become impossible. We take
more sleep than our ancestors, and we take
more because we want more. Six hours sleep
viii do very we'll for plowman or bricklayer
or any other man who has no other exhaustion
than that produced by manual labor, and the
sooner he takes it after the labor is over the
better but for man whose labor is mental,
the stress of whose works is on his brain and
nervous system. and who is tired in the evening
with day Of mental application, neither early
to bed nor early to rise is wholesome. He needs
letting down to the level of repose. The longer
the interval between the active use of his brain
and his retirement to bed, the better his chance
of recruitment. To him an hour after midnight
is probably as good as two hours before it, and
even then his sleep will not so completely and
quickly restore him as it will his neighbor who
is only physically tired. He must not only go
to bed later, but lie longer His best sleep prob
ably lies in the early morning hours when all
the nervous excitement has passed away, and
he is in absolute rest. There is, therefore, a
good deal to be said in favor of the habits of
modern life 1t was all very well for English
men to go to bed early and get up early in the
times of the Tudors, Plantagenets, and Stuarts
Their lights were bad, and it was expensive
work to make a room light enough to be pleas
ant. They did not turn night into day as we
do; but it was probably because they did not
know how to do it as we know. Gas is respon-
sible for good deal of our love for the long
evening hours London house at this time
of the year is never so bright as it is after dark.
When the blinds down and the shutters
closed, and the snug curtains drawn, and
the room is flooded with brilliant gaslight, and
the bright fire is stirred up in the shining CRATE
nobody regrets the sckly daylight, which all
day long had been feebly struggling through the
fog and smoke. Why should wish TO
shorten the brightest hours of the twenty-four
for the sake of an hour or two of foggy ineffect-
ual morning? 1t is not mere retaliation on our
ancestors it is simply the adoption of their
maxims to our modern needs to say that, for
many of us, one waking hour after ten o'clock at
night is worth two before nine o'clock in the
morning We live double at the social evening
time, and to waste such hours in sleep when
there is spare hour in the morning, which may
lust as we'll be spent in bed in an unwise SUBJ
stituton of the old maxims for experience.
No doubt the old maxims were wise, and would
still be wise if our conditions were of our great
rrandfathers but while the maxims stand the
times have changed, and we have changed with
them. We must have society, and we can only
have 1t at night; we must nave ample rest, ana
we can only take it in the morning. The stress
of life, with u.s. is on the brain and nerves and
they can only bear the pressure by being allowed
to sleep out For man whose work is intel
lectual to have sleep violently cut short every
morning would be half equivalent to suicide.
True wisdom teaches US to adopt ourselves to
circumstanc Nature does not change; and
what was good for our fathers is doubtless good
for US, provided the conditions are the same.
II H. Ill
their examples to become tyranny. Modern
habits are not more readily indulgent than the
habits of earlier times, and they best suit mod
ern needs