Shew me such a virtue in any of these new inventions, and I’ll yield there were some reason perhaps in making use of them, if they might with ease and quiet be procured. But to buy them at the price of so much pains, time, and hazard as they cost us, undoubtedly too much, although they brought as much benefit as they do prejudice. Consider well, I pray, whether it be not a thing to make a wise man run beside himself, to see such a ransacking of all the elements by fishers and fowlers, and hunters; such a turmoiling of the world by cooks and comfit-makers, and tavern-keepers and a numberless many of such needless occupations; such a hazarding of mens lives on sea and land, by heat and cold, and a thousand other dangers and difficulties; and all forsooth in procuring dainties for the satisfaction of a greedy maw, and senseless stomach, that within a very short while after must of necessity make a banquet of itself to worms. What an endless maze of error, what an intolerable hell of torments and afflictions hath this wicked gluttony brought the world unto. And yet, wretched men that we are, we have no mind to get out of it, but like silly animals led by the chaps, go on all day long, digging our graves with our teeth, till at last we bring the earth over our heads much before we otherwise need to have done. And yet there was a certain odd fellow once in the world, I would there were not too many of the same mind nowadays! Philoxenus by name, that seriously wished he might have a swallow as long and as large as the cranes, the better to enjoy the full relish of his licorish morsels. Long after him, I read of another of the same fraternity, Apicius, I trow, that set all his happiness in good cheer: but little credit, I am sure, he hath got by the means; no more than Maximinus, for all he was an Emperor, by his using every meal to stuff into his paunch thirty pounds of flesh, beside bread and wine to boot. But Geta deserves, in my opinion, the monarchy of gluttons, as he had of the Romans. His feasts went alway according to the letters of the alphabet, as when P’s turn came, he would have plovers, and partridges, and peacocks, and the like; and so in all the rest, his table was always furnished with meats whose names began with one and the same letter. But what do I raking up this carrion? Let them rot in their corruption and lie more covered over with infamy than with earth. Only, to give the world notice who have been the great masters of this worthy science of filling the stomach and following good cheer, I have been enforced to make this remembrance of some of their goodly opinions and pranks. Which let who so will be their partner in: for my part, I solemnly avow, that I find no greater misery than to victual the camp, as the proverb is, cramming in lustily over night, and to be bound next morning to rise early and to go about serious business.