King Solomon’s discreet counsel to him that feasts with royalty, to put a knife to his throat, if he be a man given to appetite, may be advantageously enlarged in its application to diners-out, or for the matter of that, to diners at home, all and sundry. Sitting to eat with a ruler, the guest is admonished to consider diligently what is before him; and at the same time to be not desirous of the great man’s dainties, for they are deceitful meat. Any and every man given to appetite will do well to chew the cud of this bitter fancy; and the prophylactic application of a knife to the throat, forbidding rash ingress and intemperate speed of swallow, is wholesome for all estates and degrees of men among us, and might beneficially be a standing order for all times.
Adam Smith, in his “Theory of the Moral Sentiments,” calls it “indecent” to express any strong degree of those passions which arise from a certain situation or disposition of the body; because the company, not being in the same disposition, cannot be expected to sympathize with them; and he mentions violent hunger as being, though upon many occasions not only natural, but unavoidable, yet “always indecent; and to eat voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill manners.” There is, however, he allows, some degree of sympathy, even with hunger, and we may add, even on the part of a ruler at whose table sits the man given to appetite. Lewis the Fourteenth, himself a gourmand, and, which is different, an enormous eater, liked to see a dinner guest disposing wholesale of the royal cates, if only by way of keeping himself in countenance, while achieving the like result. Royalty has, indeed, again and again been addicted to surfeiting, and sometimes of a memorably fatal sort. Alexander Jannæus died of gluttony, during the siege of Ragaba. Soliman, the seventh khalif of the race of the Ommiyades, died of a surfeit at Chalcis, in Syria, while preparing to lead an army to Constantinople.[29] Of the emperor Jovian, we read in Gibbon, that one night, at the obscure town Dadastana, after indulging himself with a redundant supper, he retired to rest, and was next morning found dead in his bed—an event ascribed by some, though not by all, to the quality of the mushrooms, plus the quantity of wine, which he had swallowed in the evening. The same historian rather more than suspects that the mortal disease of Athanaric the Goth “was contracted amidst the pleasures of the imperial banquets,” by Theodosius provided. Pope Benedict XI. is said to have died of a surfeit of fruit—some beautiful fresh figs, of which he was very fond, being offered to him in a silver basin by a veiled novice, as if from the abbess of the convent of St. Petronilla, in Perugia: “The pope, not suspecting a gift from such a hand, ate them eagerly, and without having them previously tasted.” That he died of poison, few in that age, as Milman says, would venture to doubt, but the poisoning power of arrears of undigested food has never been quite rated at its full value. The same hesitation between fruit surfeit and poison, obtains in the case of King John, whose death, by one account due to the fatal drug administered by a Cistercian monk, by another is attributed to an intemperate indulgence at supper in fruit and new cider. The Emperor Frederick III. contracted his last illness, some say, by a surfeit of melons. And is there not, in the case of our Henry I., what has been called that tale of royal excess so concisely and pathetically told in nursery history? “He never smiled again, and died of a surfeit of lampreys.” The regicide lampreys, Moore calls them in one place; and in another, after citing Hume’s remark on them, as “a food which always agreed better with his [Henry’s] palate than his constitution,” a dish so indigestible, that a late novelist, at the end of his book, could imagine no more summary mode of getting rid of all his heroes and heroines than by a hearty supper of stewed lampreys. In yet another the same squib-writer has a cruel simile, “just as honest King Stephen his beaver might doff to the fishes that carried his kind uncle off.” To a surfeit of red herrings is ascribed the death of Robert Greene, the dramatist. The trap for the life of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was baited, as De Quincey expresses it, with toasted cheese. Kaiser Karl VI. was the victim of a voracious repast on mushrooms stewed in oil.
When Hadrian found his illness on the increase, and his end approaching, he removed to Baiæ, where, “in spite of the prescriptions [or proscriptions?] of his physicians, he began to eat and drink according to his pleasure.” The excesses of Charles V. in the same way are exceptionally notorious. Of that “little, spare, aguish, peevish, supper-eating” sovereign, Frederick the Great, who loved his dishes the more they tormented him, it is on record, that on the approach of death, “this warrior full of courage and sage speculation,” could not resist the customary pepper and sauce piquante, though he knew it would inevitably result in a nightmare, “turning his bed into a nest of monsters.” So with the Duke Augustus commemorated by Perthes: “All medical skill was in vain, for this half crazy prince could not deny himself the stimulus of the hottest spices.” Mr. Tennyson’s dying Northern Farmer is only too true a type of his kind:—
“What atta stannin’ theer for, an’ doesn bring ma the yaäle?
Doctor’s a’tottler, lass, an a’s hallus i’ the owd taäle;
I weänt breäk rules for doctor, a knaws naw more nor a floy;
Git ma my yaäle I tell tha, an’ gin I mun doy I mun doy.”
Swift is giving Pope a significant and not uncalled-for hint, when he writes to express his uneasiness at ever hearing of the poet’s being out to dinner: “For the least transgression of yours, if it be only two bits and one sup more than your stint, is a great debauch; for which you certainly pay more than those sots who are carried dead drunk to bed.” An entry in Mrs. Trench’s diary begins, “Dined at the Duke of Queensberry’s. He is very ill—has a violent cough, but will eat an immense dinner, and then complains of a digestion pénible.” Another of his quality has been described as taking all sorts of pains to get a little enjoyment which must produce for him a world of misery. “One of his passions which he will not resist, is for a particular dish, pungent, savoury, and multifarious, which sends him almost every night into Tartarus.” Mr. Thackeray’s moribund old Madame Bernstein will have her supper luxurious, “nor could any injunction of ours or the doctor’s teach her abstinence.” The Sir Miles St. John of another popular fiction does himself to death after the same manner: “He would have his own way; and he contrived to coax or to force his doctor into an authority on his side.” For doctors are not all of the kind that Sancho Panza had to deal with when governor of Barataria. The Doctor cites the case of an eminent member of “the faculty,” who could never refrain from eating toasted cheese, though he was subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint which was uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated fatally at an age by no means advanced. Another he relates, of a physician who, at an autumnal dessert never ceased eating all the filberts he could lay his hands upon, while candidly acknowledging what indigestible and hurtful things they were.
Not a doctor apparently of medicine, but (proh pudor!) of divinity, was that Cambridge don of whose end Gray makes memorable mention, as having gone to his grave with five fine mackarel (large and full of roe) in his inside. “He ate them all off at one dinner; but his fate was a turbot on Trinity Sunday, of which he left little for the company besides bones. He had not been hearty all the week; but after this sixth fish he never held up his head more.” Like Milton’s Eve, in one sense at least:—