| There's no want of meat, Sir; Portly and curious viands are prepared To please all kinds of appetites. MASSINGER. |
A fastidious taste is like a squeamish appetite; the one has its origin in some disease of mind, as the other has in some ailment of the stomach. Your true lover of literature is never fastidious. I do not mean the helluo librorum, the swinish feeder, who thinks that every name which is to be found in a title-page, or on a tomb-stone, ought to be rescued from oblivion; nor those first cousins of the moth, who labour under a bulimy for black-letter, and believe every thing to be excellent which was written in the reign of Elizabeth. I mean the man of robust and healthy intellect, who gathers the harvest of literature into his barns, threshes the straw, winnows the grain, grinds it at his own mill, bakes it in his own oven, and then eats the true bread of knowledge. If he bake his loaf upon a cabbage leaf, and eat onions with his bread and cheese, let who will find fault with him for his taste,—not I!
The Doves, father as well as son, were blest with a hearty intellectual appetite, and a strong digestion: but the son had the more catholic taste. He would have relished caviare; would have ventured upon laver undeterred by its appearance—and would have liked it.
| What an excellent thing did God bestow on man When he did give him a good stomach!1 |
1 BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.
He would have eaten sausages for breakfast at Norwich, Sally Luns at Bath, Sweet Butter in Cumberland, Orange Marmalade at Edinburgh, Findon Haddocks at Aberdeen, and drunk punch with Beef steaks to oblige the French if they insisted upon obliging him with a dejeûner a l'Angloise.
A good digestion turneth all to health.2
2 HERBERT.