relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine
own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants,
partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl"),
capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I
receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my
friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear,
"give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an
ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate,
or send out of the house, slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or
I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I
may say, to my individual palate--It argues an insensibility.

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old
aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without
stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had
dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the
oven. In my way to school (it was over London Bridge) a grey-headed
old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was
a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity
of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy-like, I
made him a present of--the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed
up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of
self-satisfaction; but before I had got to the end of the bridge, my
better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how
ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift
away to a stranger, that I had never seen before, and who might be a
bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt
would be taking in thinking that I--I myself, and not another--would
eat her nice cake--and what should I say to her the next time I saw
her--how naughty I was to part with her pretty present--and the odour
of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure
and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when
she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I
had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last--and I blamed my
impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of
goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of that
insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender
victim