plers than old physicians.' Custom is every thing; only get well
seasoned at the first start, and all the rest of life is a summer's
scene. Snymdiris the

Sybarite never once saw the sun rise or set during a course of twenty
years; yet he lived to a good old age, drank like a centaur, and never
went to bed sober."

And when his glass was out, he fell Like some ripe kernel from its
shell.

"I was once an anti-gastronomist and a rigid antisaccharinite; sugar and
milk were banished from my breakfast-table, vegetables and puddings
my only diet, until I almost ceased to vegetate, and my cranium was
considered as soft as a custard; and curst hard it was to cast off all
culinary pleasures, sweet reminiscences of my infancy, commencing with
our first spoonful of pap, for all young protestants are papists; to
this day my heart (like Wordsworth's) ~108~~overflows at the sight of
a pap-boat--the boat a child first mans; to speak naughty-cally, as
a nurse would say, how many a row is there in the pap-boat--how many
squalls attend it when first it comes into contact with the skull! But I
am now grown corpulent; in those days I was a lighter-man, and I believe
I should have continued to live (exist) upon herbs and roots; but Dr.
Kitchener rooted up all my prejudices, and overturned the whole system
of my theory by practical illustrations.

"Thus he that's wealthy, if he's wise,
Commands an earthly paradise;
That happy station nowhere found,
But where the glass goes freely round.
Then give us wine, to drown the cares
Of life in our declining years,
That we may gain, if Heav'n think fitting,
By drinking, what was lost by eating:
For though mankind for that offence
Were doom'd to labour ever since,
Yet Mercy has the grape impower'd
To sweeten what the apple sour'd."

To this good-humoured sally of Pendragon succeeded a long dissertation
on meats, which it is not _meet_ I should relate, being for the most
part idle conceits of Mr. Galen Cornaro, who carried about him a long
list of those prescribed eatables, which engender bile, breed the
_incubus_, and produce spleen, until, according to his bill of fare, he
had left himself nothing to subsist upon in this land of plenty but a
mutton-chop, or a beef-steak. What pleased me most was, that with every
fresh bottle the two disciples of Pythagoras and Abernethy beca