A GLUTTON
Eats his children, as the poets say Saturn did, and carries his felicity and all his concernments in his paunch. If he had lived when all the members of the body rebelled against the stomach there had been no possibility of accommodation. His entrails are like the sarcophagus, that devours dead bodies in a small space, or the Indian zampatan, that consumes flesh in a moment. He is a great dish made on purpose to carry meat. He eats out his own head, and his horses' too; he knows no grace but grace before meat, nor mortification but in fasting. If the body be the tabernacle of the soul, he lives in a sutler's hut. He celebrates mass, or rather mess, to the idol in his belly, and, like a papist, eats his adoration. A third course is the third heaven to him, and he is ravished into it. A feast is a good conscience to him, and he is troubled in mind when he misses of it. His teeth are very industrious in their calling, and his chops like a Bridewell perpetually hatcheling. He depraves his appetite with haut-gousts, as old fornicators do their lechery into fulsomeness and stinks. He licks himself into the shape of a bear, as those beasts are said to do their whelps. He new forms himself in his own belly, and becomes another thing than God and Nature meant him. His belly takes place of the rest of his members, and walks before in state. He eats out that which eats all things else--time--and is very curious to have all things in season at his meals but his hours, which are commonly at midnight, and so late that he prays too late for his daily bread, unless he mean his natural daily bread. He is admirably learned in the doctrines of meats and sauces, and deserves the chair in juris-prudentia; that is, in the skill of pottages. At length he eats his life out of house and home and becomes a treat for worms, sells his clothes to feed his gluttony, and eats himself naked, as the first of his family, Adam, did.