CHAP. IV.
CURIOSITIES RESPECTING MAN.—(Continued.)
Instances of Extraordinary Gluttony—Instances of Extraordinary Fasting—Wonders of Abstinence—Sleep Walking—Sleeping Woman of Dunninald—Instances of Extraordinary Dreams—Poetical, Grammatical, and Scientific Deaths—Anthropophagi, or Men-Eaters—Account of a Wild Man.
Instances of Extraordinary Gluttony.
Habitual gluttons may be reckoned among the monsters of nature, and even punishable for endeavouring to bring a famine into the places where they live. King James I. when a man was presented to him who could eat a whole sheep at one meal, asked, “What work could he do more than another man?” and being answered, “He could not do so much,” said, “Hang him, then; for it is unfit a man should live, that eats as much as twenty men, and cannot do so much as one.”
The emperor Clodius Albinus devoured more than a bushel of apples at once. He ate 500 figs to his breakfast, 100 peaches, 10 melons, 20lbs. of grapes, 100 gnat-snappers, and 400 oysters.
Hardi Canute, the last of the Danish kings in England, was so great a glutton, that an historian calls him Bocca di Porco, “Swine’s-mouth.” His tables were covered four times a day with the most costly viands that either the air, sea, or land, could furnish; and as he lived he died; for, revelling at a banquet at Lambeth, he fell down dead.
One Phagon, in the reign of Aurelianus, at one meal, ate a whole boar, 100 loaves of bread, a sheep, and a pig, and drank above three gallons of wine.
One Mallet, a counsellor at law, in the reign of Charles I. ate at one time a dinner provided in Westminster for 30 men. His practice not being sufficient to supply him with better meat, he fed generally on offals, ox livers, hearts, &c. He lived to near 60 years of age, but during the seven last years of his life ate as moderately as other men.
Among the many accounts of extraordinary eaters, there are, perhaps, none that have exceeded those of Nicholas Wood, of Harrison, in Kent, related in Fuller’s Worthies, p. 86, whose enormous appetite appears to exceed all probability.