But I would fain once understand from these gluttons, that seem born only to waste good meat, what the reason may be, that nowadays the store of victuals is so much abated, and the price enhanced of that it was in time of old, when yet the world appears to have been then much fuller of people than it now is? Undoubtedly, that scarcity and dearness under which we labour, can proceed from nothing but our excessive gluttony which devours things faster than Nature can bring them forth. And that plenty and cheapness, which crowned their happy days, was maintained and kept on foot chiefly through the good husbandry of that frugal and simple diet which they used. S. Jerome, writing of the course of life held by those good fathers that retired themselves into the deserts of Egypt, the better to serve God, tells us, that they were so enamoured of spare and simple diet, that they censured it in themselves for a kind of riot, to feed on anything that was dressed with fire. The same in every point doth Cassian report, in his relations of the holy monks and hermits of his time. I find in ancient physicians, that the inhabitants of the old world were such strict followers of sobriety, that they kept themselves precisely to bread in the morning; and at night they made their supper of flesh only without addition of sauces, or any first or second courses. And by this means it came to pass, that they lived so long and in continual health without so much as once hearing the names of those many grievous infirmities that nowadays vex mankind. What think you might be the cause, that the Romans, the Arcadians, and the Portugals passed so many hundred of years, without having any acquaintance at all with physic or physicians? Surely nothing else but their sober spare diet, which when all is done, we are ofttimes constrained to undergo, and ever indeed directed and advised unto, by those who really practise this divine science of physic, for the recovery and conservation of their patient’s health, and not covetously for their own gain. I read in approved histories, that Ptolemy, upon some occasion or other out-riding his followers in Egypt, was so pressed with hunger, that he was fain to call in at a poor man’s cottage, who brought him a piece of rye-bread; which when he had eaten, he took a solemn oath, that he never in all his life tasted better, nor more pleasing meat: and from that day forward, he set light by all the costly sorts of bread, which he had been formerly accustomed unto.