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.