Such were the tremulous nerves which seemed to need the stimulus of alcohol, and which were so easily swayed and upset by it. The lachrymose and dolorous tones of Respectability are forever croaking loud in lamentation that Lamb was a Drunkard. It is not true. He was no drunkard. He could not have been a drunkard with his delicate organization. I believe that he suffered, unknowingly withal, from the malady now named nervous dyspepsia; to which he was a victim, partly by inheritance, largely by his own indiscretions. He was careless in his habits, in his diet, in his exercise--walking often at unfitting hours and for excessive hours--and he had no regard at all for any sort of proper precautions. Although habitually given to plain fare, and no gormandizer, he was at times fond of outrageous dishes, and fearless in his appalling experiments on his digestive machinery. He audaciously claimed for himself the stomach of Heliogabalus! Like Thackeray, he had the courage of his gastronomic convictions, and he has left an imperishable record of his love for roast pig, cow-heel, and brawn. “I am no Quaker at my food--I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.... I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating; I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal”--admirable appreciation! “C---- holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings--I am not sure but he is right.” And about a pig, just then roasting, he wrote to Wordsworth: “How beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose!” He could snatch a fearful joy even from that baleful refection, cold brawn; and only at the thought thereof, as he is writing, he glows with esurient unction. “‘Tis, of all my hobbies, the supreme in the eating way.... It is like a picture of one of the old Italian masters; its gusto is of that hidden sort.”