“O wretched and unhappy Italy! [thus he apostrophises his own country] can you not see that gluttony murders every year more of your inhabitants than you could lose by the most cruel plague or by fire and sword in many battles? Those truly shameful feasts (_i tuoi veramente disonesti banchetti_), now so much in fashion and so intolerably profuse that no tables are large enough to hold the infinite number of the dishes--those feasts, I say, are so many battles.[102] And how is it possible _to live_ amongst such a multitude of jarring foods and disorders? Put an end to this abuse, in heaven’s name, for there is not--I am certain of it--a vice more abominable than this in the eyes of the divine Majesty. Drive away this plague, the worst you were ever afflicted with--this new [?] kind of death--as you have banished that disease which, though it formerly used to make such havoc, now does little or no mischief, owing to the laudable practice of attending more to the goodness of the provisions brought to our markets. Consider that there are means still left to banish intemperance, and such means, too, that every man may have recourse to them without any external assistance. “Nothing more is requisite for this purpose than to live up to the simplicity, dictated by nature, which teaches us to be content with little, to pursue the practice of holy abstemiousness and divine reason, and _accustom ourselves to eat no more than is absolutely necessary to support life_; considering that what exceeds this is disease and death, and done merely to give the palate a satisfaction which, though but momentary, brings on the body a long and lasting train of disagreeable diseases, and at length kills it along with the soul. How many friends of mine--men of the finest understanding and most amiable disposition--have I seen carried off by this plague in the flower of their youth! who, were they now living, would be an ornament to the public, and whose company I should enjoy with as much pleasure as I am now deprived of it with concern.” He tells us that he had undertaken his arduous task of proselytising with the more anxiety and zeal that he had been encouraged to it by many of his friends, men of “the finest intellect” (_di bellissimo intelletto_), who lamented the premature deaths of parents and relatives, and who observed so manifest a proof of the advantages of abstinence in the robust and vigorous frame of the dietetic missionary at the age of eighty. Cornaro was a thorough-going hygeist, and he followed a reformed _diet_ in the widest meaning of the term, attending to the various requirements of a healthy condition of mind and body:--