an, we may be assured, has ever yet
practised any true self-denial in such a case, or ever will. Either he
has been trained under a wholesome poverty to those habits which
intercept the very development of a taste for luxuries, which evade the
very possibility therefore of any; or if this taste has once formed
itself, he would find it as impossible in this as in any other case to
maintain a fight with a temptation recurring _daily_. Pompey certainly
could not. He was of a slow, torpid nature through life; required a
continual supply of animal stimulation, and, if he had _not_ required
it, was assuredly little framed by nature for standing out against an
_artificial_ battery of temptation. There is proof extant that his
system was giving way under the action of daily dinners. Cicero mentions
the fact of his suffering from an annual illness; what may be called the
_etesian_ counter-current from his intemperance. Probably the liver was
enlarged, and the pylorus was certainly not healthy. Cicero himself was
not free from dyspeptic symptoms. If he had survived the Triumvirate, he
would have died within seven years from some disease of the intestinal
canal. Atticus, we suspect, was troubled with worms. Locke, indeed, than
whom no man ever less was acquainted with Greek or Roman life, pretends
that the ancients seldom used a pocket-handkerchief; knew little of
catarrhs, and even less of what the French consider indigenous to this
rainy island--_le catch-cold_. Nothing can be more unfounded. Locke was
bred a physician, but his practice had been none; himself and the cat
were his chief patients. Else we, who are no physicians, would wish to
ask him--what meant those continual _febriculae_ to which all Romans of
rank were subject? What meant that _fluenter lippire_, a symptom so
troublesome to Cicero's eyes, and always arguing a functional, if not
even an organic, derangement of the stomach? Take this rule from us,
that wherever the pure white of the eye is clouded, or is veined with
red streaks, or wherever a continual weeping moistens the eyelashes,
there the digestive organs are touched with some morbid affection,
probably in it's early stages; as also that the inferior viscera, _not_
the stomach, must be slightly disordered before toothache _can_ be an
obstinate affection. And as to _le catch-cold_, the-most dangerous shape
in which it has ever been known, resembling the English _cholera
morbus_, belongs to the modern city of R