r swallowed her victuals very fast, and the former had a tedious
custom of sitting long at his meals. Perhaps he takes after both.

I wish you would turn this in your thoughts, Mr. Reflector, and give
us your ideas on the subject of excessive eating, and, particularly,
of animal food.

HOSPITA.

EDAX ON APPETITE.

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 arrowroot and pappish 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 anything 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.

Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be disguised. The
prying republic of which a great school consists soon