These relapses brought back his old sufferings, and, to save his life, he was driven at length to practise entire and uniform abstinence, the yolk of an egg often furnishing him the whole of his meal. In this way he assures us that he came to relish dry bread more than formerly he had enjoyed the most exquisite dishes of the ordinary table. At the end of the first year he found himself entirely freed from all his multiform maladies. In his eighty-third year he wrote and published his first exhortation to a radical change of diet under the title of _A Treatise on a Sober Life_,[101] in which he eloquently narrates his own case, and exhorts all who value health and immunity from physical or mental sufferings to follow his example. And his _exordium_, in which he takes occasion to denounce the waste and gluttony of the dinners of the rich, might be applied with little, or without any, modification of its language to the public and private tables of the present day:-- “It is very certain,” he begins, “that Custom, with time, becomes a second nature, forcing men to use that, whether good or bad, to which they have been habituated; and we see custom or habit get the better of reason in many things.... Though all are agreed that intemperance (_la crapula_) is the offspring of gluttony, and sober living of abstemiousness, the former nevertheless is considered a virtue and a mark of distinction, and the latter as dishonourable and the badge of avarice. Such mistaken notions are entirely owing to the power of Custom, established by our senses and irregular appetites. These have blinded and besotted men to such a degree that, leaving the paths of virtue, they have followed those of vice, which lead them imperceptibly to an old age burdened with strange and mortal diseases....