I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a temper different from that in which the writer composed it? The most pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II., meditating on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out, "O that I were a mockery king of snow, To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke," if we have been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be actually realized in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit; and so is a "head" turned into "waters." EDAX ON APPETITE (1811. TEXT OF 1818) _To the Editor of the Reflector_ Mr. Reflector,--I am going to lay before you a case of the most iniquitous persecution that ever poor devil suffered. You must know, then, that I have been visited with a calamity ever since my birth. How shall I mention it without offending delicacy? Yet out it must. My sufferings then have all arisen from a most inordinate appetite---- Not for wealth, not for vast possessions,--then might I have hoped to find a cure in some of those precepts of philosophers or poets,--those verba et voces which Horace speaks of: "quibus hunc lenire dolorem Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem;" not for glory, not for fame, not for applause,--for against this disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope has chosen to render it, "rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied, Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride;" nor yet for pleasure, properly so called: the strict and virtuous lessons which I received in early life from the best of parents,--a pious clergyman of the Church of England, now no more,--I trust have rendered me sufficiently secure on that side:---- No, Sir, for none of these things; but an appetite, in its coarsest and least metaphorical sense,--an appetite for _food_. The exorbitances of my arrow-root and pap-dish days I cannot go back far enough to remember, only I have been told, that my mother's constitution not admitting of my being nursed at home, the woman who had the care of me for that purpose used to make most extravagant demands for my pretended excesses in that kind; which my parents, rather than believe any thing unpleasant of me, chose to impute to the known covetousness and mercenary disposition of that sort of people. This blindness continued on their part after I was sent for home, up to the period when it was thought proper, on account of my advanced age, that I should mix with other boys more unreservedly than I had hitherto done. I was accordingly sent to boarding-school.