t am not I of the opinion of those who, after long and
pertinacious fastings, think by such means to enter more profoundly into
the speculation of celestial mysteries. You may very well remember how my
father Gargantua (whom here for honour sake I name) hath often told us that
the writings of abstinent, abstemious, and long-fasting hermits were every
whit as saltless, dry, jejune, and insipid as were their bodies when they
did compose them. It is a most difficult thing for the spirits to be in a
good plight, serene and lively, when there is nothing in the body but a
kind of voidness and inanity; seeing the philosophers with the physicians
jointly affirm that the spirits which are styled animal spring from, and
have their constant practice in and through the arterial blood, refined and
purified to the life within the admirable net which, wonderfully framed,
lieth under the ventricles and tunnels of the brain. He gave us also the
example of the philosopher who, when he thought most seriously to have
withdrawn himself unto a solitary privacy, far from the rustling
clutterments of the tumultuous and confused world, the better to improve
his theory, to contrive, comment, and ratiocinate, was, notwithstanding his
uttermost endeavours to free himself from all untoward noises, surrounded
and environed about so with the barking of curs, bawling of mastiffs,
bleating of sheep, prating of parrots, tattling of jackdaws, grunting of
swine, girning of boars, yelping of foxes, mewing of cats, cheeping of
mice, squeaking of weasels, croaking of frogs, crowing of cocks, cackling
of hens, calling of partridges, chanting of swans, chattering of jays,
peeping of chickens, singing of larks, creaking of geese, chirping of
swallows, clucking of moorfowls, cucking of cuckoos, bumbling of bees,
rammage of hawks, chirming of linnets, croaking of ravens, screeching of
owls, whicking of pigs, gushing of hogs, curring of pigeons, grumbling of
cushat-doves, howling of panthers, curkling of quails, chirping of
sparrows, crackling of crows, nuzzing of camels, wheening of whelps,
buzzing of dromedaries, mumbling of rabbits, cricking of ferrets, humming
of wasps, mioling of tigers, bruzzing of bears, sussing of kitlings,
clamouring of scarfs, whimpering of fulmarts, booing of buffaloes, warbling
of nightingales, quavering of mavises, drintling of turkeys, coniating of
storks, frantling of peacocks, clattering of magpies, murmuring of
stock-doves, crouti