Oh what a piece of purgatory is it, to feel within a man’s self those qualms, those gripings, those swimmings, and those flashing heats that follow upon over-eating! And what a shame, if our foreheads were not of brass, and our friends before whom we act them, infected with the same disease, would it be to stand yawning, stretching, and perbreaking the crudities of the former day’s surfeit! On the contrary, what a happiness do I prove, when after a sober pittance I find sound and quiet sleep all night long, and at peep of day get up as fresh as the morning itself, full of vigour and activity both in mind and body, for all manner of affairs! Let who will take his pleasure in the fulness of delicates; I desire my part may be in this happy enjoyment of my self, although it should be with the abatement of much more content than any dainties can afford. When I was last at Messina, my lord Antonio Doria, told me that he was acquainted in Spain with an old man who had lived above a hundred years. One day having invited him home and entertained him sumptuously, as his lordship’s manner is, the good old man instead of thanks told him, “_My lord, had I been accustomed to these kind of meals in my youth, I had never come to this age which you see, nor been able to preserve that health and strength both of mind and body, which you make shew so much to admire in me._” See now! here’s a proof even in our age, that the length and happiness of men’s lives in the old world was chiefly caused by the means of blessed temperance. But what need more words in a matter as evident as the sun at noonday, to all but those whose brains are sunk down into the quagmire of their stomachs? I’ll make an end with that which cannot be denied, nor deluded, nor resisted; so plain is the truth, and so great is the authority of the argument; and this it is: Peruse all histories of whatever times and people, and you shall always find the haters of a sober life and spare diet to have been sworn enemies against goodness and virtue: witness Claudius, Caligula, Heliogabalus, Clodius the tragedian, Vitellius, Verus, Tiberius, and the like. And on the contrary, the friends and followers of sobriety and frugality to have been men of divine spirits, and most heroical performances for the benefit of mankind; such as were Augustus, Alexander Severus, Paulus Æmilius, Epaminondas, Socrates, and all the rest who are registered for excellent in the lists of princes, soldiers and philosophers. A spare diet then is better than a splendid and sumptuous, let the Sardanapaluses of our age prattle what they list. Nature, and reason, and experience, and the example of all virtuous persons prove it to be so. He that goes about to persuade me otherwise shall lose his labour, though he had his tongue and brain furnished with all the sophistry and eloquence that ever Greece and Italy could jointly have afforded. FOOTNOTES: