is the great secret of life; and that
character, talents, virtues, and qualities are powerfully affected by
beef, mutton, pie-crust, and rich soups. I have often thought I could
feed or starve men into many virtues and vices, and affect them more
powerfully with my instruments of cookery than Timotheus could do
formerly with his lyre."[173]

According to his own accounts of himself he seems, like most people who are
boisterously cheerful, to have had occasional tendencies to melancholy. "An
extreme depression of spirits," he writes in 1826, "is an evil of which I
have a full comprehension." But, on the other hand, he writes:--

"I thank God, who has made me poor, that He has made me merry. I think
it a better gift than much wheat and bean-land, with a doleful heart."

"My constitutional gaiety comes to my aid in all the difficulties of
life; and the recollection that, having embraced the character of an
honest man and a friend to rational liberty, I have no business to
repine at that mediocrity of fortune which I _knew_ to be its
consequence."

The truth would seem to be that, finding, in his temperament and
circumstances, some predisposing causes of melancholy, he refused to sit
down under the curse and let it poison his life, but took vigorous measures
with himself and his surroundings; cultivated cheerfulness as a duty, and
repelled gloom as a disease. He "tried always to live in the Present and
the Future, and to look upon the Past as so much dirty linen." After
reading Burke, and praising his "beautiful and fruitful imagination," he
says--"With the politics of so remote a period I do not concern myself." He
had a robust confidence in the cheering virtues of air and exercise, early
hours and cold water, light and warmth, temperance in tea and coffee as
well as wine--"Apothegms of old women," as he truly said, but tested by
universal experience and found efficacious. He recommended constant
occupation, combined with variety of interests, and taught that nothing
made one feel so happy as the act of doing good. He thus describes his own
experience, when, as Canon of St. Paul's, he had presented a valuable
living to the friendless son of the deceased incumbent. He announced the
presentation to the stricken family.--

"They all burst into tears. It flung me also into a great agitation,
and I wept and groaned for a long time. Then I rose, and said I
thought