The gods, whose favorite I lately was, have tried me,” etc. The weakening of his powers in the latter part of _Faust_ and at the end of _Wilhelm Meister_ was abundantly shown. We resume our historical notes with Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566),[72] a wealthy Venetian nobleman, who, as a result of a wild and intemperate life, found himself at forty broken in health and facing death and so radically changed not only his mode of life but his residence and devoted himself, after this crisis, with the “most incessant attention” to the securing of perfect health, studying every item of diet and regimen for its effects upon him. At eighty-three, after more than forty years of perfect health and undisturbed tranquillity, he wrote his _La Vita Sobria_, an essay that was later followed by three others, one written at eighty-six, another at ninety-one, the last at ninety-five; the four completing a most instructive life history and one which the most earnest desire and hope of his life was that others might know and follow. He believed that the kind of life most people lead is utterly worthless and emphasized the great value of the later years of life as compared with the earlier ones. His message to the world has been a classic. He hoped that he had made the moderate life so attractive that the attitude of the world toward old age and death would be changed. In his first discourse he gives many details of how he conceived life in the simple way nature intended it and how we must learn to be content with a little and experience all the joys that come from self-control. When the passions are subdued, man can give himself up wholly to reason. His physicians told him that he must partake of no food save that prescribed for invalids but he found that he must carefully study each article of diet and decide for himself because no general prescriptions avail. By dint of long observations upon himself he started with the belief that “whatever tastes good will nourish and strengthen” and learned that “not to satiate oneself with food is the science of health.” He guarded particularly against great heat, cold, and fatigue; allowed nothing to interfere with his rest and sleep, would never stay in an ill-ventilated room, and avoided excessive exposure to wind and sun. At the age of seventy he was severely injured by a carriage accident so that all his friends expected his death and the physicians suggested either bleeding or purging as forlorn hopes. He refused both and trusted to the recuperative effects of his well regulated life. He recovered completely as he, indeed, fully expected to do, although it was thought by his friends to be miraculous. Later, yielding reluctantly to the urgency of physicians and friends, he increased his daily intake of food so that instead of twelve ounces, including bread, the yolk of an egg, a little meat and soup, he now took fourteen ounces; and instead of fourteen ounces of wine, as before, he raised his ration to sixteen ounces. Under