ins nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or
science of eating well. My imagination has delivered three repasts to
the custody of my memory, which fortune rendered sovereignly sweet to me,
upon several occasions in my more flourishing age; my present state
excludes me; for every one, according to the good temper of body and mind
wherein he then finds himself, furnishes for his own share a particular
grace and savour. I, who but crawl upon the earth, hate this inhuman
wisdom, that will have us despise and hate all culture of the body; I
look upon it as an equal injustice to loath natural pleasures as to be
too much in love with them. Xerxes was a blockhead, who, environed with
all human delights, proposed a reward to him who could find out others;
but he is not much less so who cuts off any of those pleasures that
nature has provided for him. A man should neither pursue nor avoid them,
but receive them. I receive them, I confess, a little too warmly and
kindly, and easily suffer myself to follow my natural propensions. We
have no need to exaggerate their inanity; they themselves will make us
sufficiently sensible of it, thanks to our sick wet-blanket mind, that
puts us out of taste with them as with itself; it treats both itself and
all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its
insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:

"Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acescit."

["Unless the vessel be clean, it will sour whatever
you put into it."--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 54.]

I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the
conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very
little more than wind. But what? We are all wind throughout; and,
moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and
shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices
without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.

The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination,
say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of
Critolaiis. 'Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts
them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples,
and, peradventure, to be desired. But I, who am of a mixed and heavy
condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I
negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present