Supreme beauty is seldom found in cottages or work-
shops, even where no real hardships are suffered. To expand the
human face to its full perfection, it seems necessary that the mind
should co-operate by placidness of content, or consciousness of
superiority.
Their strength is proportionate to their size, but they are
accustomed to run upon rough ground, and therefore can with great
agility skip over the bog, or clamber the mountain. For a campaign
in the wastes of America, soldiers better qualified could not have
been found. Having little work to do, they are not willing, nor
perhaps able to endure a long continuance of manual labour, and are
therefore considered as habitually idle.
Having never been supplied with those accommodations, which life
extensively diversified with trades affords, they supply their
wants by very insufficient shifts, and endure many inconveniences,
which a little attention would easily relieve. I have seen a horse
carrying home the harvest on a crate. Under his tail was a stick
for a crupper, held at the two ends by twists of straw. Hemp will
grow in their islands, and therefore ropes may be had. If they
wanted hemp, they might make better cordage of rushes, or perhaps
of nettles, than of straw.
Their method of life neither secures them perpetual health, nor
exposes them to any particular diseases. There are physicians in
the Islands, who, I believe, all practise chirurgery, and all
compound their own medicines.
It is generally supposed, that life is longer in places where there
are few opportunities of luxury; but I found no instance here of
extraordinary longevity. A cottager grows old over his oaten
cakes, like a citizen at a turtle feast. He is indeed seldom
incommoded by corpulence. Poverty preserves him from sinking under
the burden of himself, but he escapes no other injury of time.
Instances of long life are often related, which those who hear them
are more willing to credit than examine. To be told that any man
has attained a hundred years, gives hope and comfort to him who
stands trembling on the brink of his own climacterick.
Length of life is distributed impartially to very different modes
of life in very different climates; and the mountains have no
greater examples of age and health than the low lands, where I was
introduced to two ladies of high quality; one of whom, in her
ninety-fourth year, presided at her table with the full exercise of
all her powers; and the other has attained her eighty-fourth,
without any diminution of her vivacity, and with little reason to
accuse time of depredations on her beauty.
