Long before the son of Sirach, Solomon had spoken to the same effect: “there is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in its labour. This also I saw that it was from the hand of God.” “Go thy way said the wisest of monarchs and of men, in his old age, when he took a more serious view of his past life; the honours, pleasures, wealth, wisdom he had so abundantly enjoyed; the errors and miscarriages which he had fallen into; the large experience and many observations he had made, of things natural, moral, domestical: civil, sensual, divine: the curious and critical inquiry he had made after true happiness, and what contribution all things under the sun could afford thereunto:”—“Go thy way,” he said, “eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart!”
“Inasmuch,” says Bishop Reynolds in his commentary upon this passage, “as the dead neither know, nor enjoy any of these worldly blessings; and inasmuch as God gives them to his servants in love, and as comfortable refreshments unto them in the days of their vanity, therefore he exhorteth unto a cheerful fruition of them, while we have time and liberty so to do; that so the many other sorrows and bitterness which they shall meet with in this life, may be mitigated and sweetened unto them. He speaketh not of sensual, epicurean and brutish excess; but of an honest, decent, and cheerful enjoyment of blessings, with thankfulness, and in the fear of God.” “A merry heart” the Bishop tells us might in this text have been rendered a good one; as in other parts of scripture a sad heart is called an evil heart. “It is pleasing unto God,” says the Bishop, “that when thou hast in the fear of his name, and in obedience to his ordinance, laboured, and by his blessing gotten thee thine appointed portion, then thou shouldst, after an honest, cheerful, decent and liberal manner, without further anxiety or solicitousness, enjoy the same. This is the principal boundary of our outward pleasures and delights, still to keep ourselves within such rules of piety and moderation, as that our ways may be pleasing unto God. And this shows us the true way to find sweetness in the creature, and to feel joy in the fruition thereof; namely, when our persons and our ways are pleasing unto God: for piety doth not exclude, but only moderate earthly delights; and so moderate them, that though they be not so excessive as the luxurious and sensual pleasures of foolish epicures, yet they are far more pure, sweet and satisfactory, as having no guilt, no gall, no curse, nor inward sorrow and terrors attending on them.”
Farther the Bishop observes, that food and raiment being the substantiall of outward blessings, Solomon has directed unto cheerfulness in the one, and unto decency and comeliness in the other. He hath advised us also to let the head lack no ointment, such perfumes being an expression of joy used in feasts; “the meaning is,” says the Bishop, “that we should lead our lives with as much freeness, cheerfulness and sweet delight, in the liberal use of the good blessings of God, as the quality of our degree, the decency of our condition, and the rules of religious wisdom, and the fear of God do allow us; not sordidly or frowardly denying ourselves the benefit of those good things which the bounty of God hath bestowed upon us.”
It is the etiquette of the Chinese Court for the Emperor's physicians to apply the same epithet to his disease as to himself—so they talk of his most high and mighty diarrhœa.
At such a point of etiquette the Doctor would laugh—but he was all earnestness when one like Bishop Hacket said, “Do not disgrace the dignity of a Preacher, when every petty vain occasion doth challenge the honour of a sermon before it. If ever there were τὸ δέον οὐκ ἐν τῶ δεόντι,—a good work marred for being done unreasonably,”—(in the Doctor's own words, Grace before a sluttish meal, a dirty table cloth)—“now it is when grace before meat will not serve the turn, but every luxurious feast must have the benediction of a preacher's pains before it. Quis te ferat cœnantem ut Lucullus, concionantem ut Cato? Much less is it to be endured, that some body must make a sermon, before Lucullus hath made a supper. It is such a flout upon our calling methinks, as the Chaldeans put upon the Jews in their captivity,—they in the height of their jollity must have one of the Songs of Sion.”
The Doctor agreed in the main with Lord Chesterfield in his opinion upon political dieteticks.
“The Egyptians who were a wise nation,” says that noble author, “thought so much depended upon diet, that they dieted their kings, and prescribed by law both the quality and quantity of their food. It is much to be lamented, that those bills of fare are not preserved to this time, since they might have been of singular use in all monarchical governments. But it is reasonably to be conjectured, from the wisdom of that people, that they allowed their kings no aliments of a bilious or a choleric nature, and only such as sweetened their juices, cooled their blood, and enlivened their faculties,—if they had any.”
He then shews that what was deemed necessary for an Egyptian King is not less so for a British Parliament. For, “suppose,” he says, “a number of persons, not over-lively at best, should meet of an evening to concert and deliberate upon public measures of the utmost consequence, grunting under the load and repletion of the strongest meats, panting almost in vain for breath, but quite in vain for thought, and reminded only of their existence by the unsavoury returns of an olio; what good could be expected from such a consultation? The best one could hope for would be, that they were only assembled for shew, and not for use; not to propose or advise, but silently to submit to the orders of some one man there, who, feeding like a rational creature, might have the use of his understanding.
“I would therefore recommend it to the consideration of the legislature, whether it may not be necessary to pass an act, to restrain the licentiousness of eating, and assign certain diets to certain ranks and stations, I would humbly suggest the strict vegetable as the properest ministerial diet, being exceedingly tender of those faculties in which the public is so highly interested, and very unwilling they should be clogged, or incumbered.”
“The Earl of Carlisle,” says Osborne, in his Traditional Memorials, “brought in the vanity of ante-suppers, not heard of in our forefathers' time, and for ought I have read, or at least remember, unpractised by the most luxurious tyrants. The manner of which was, to have the board covered at the first entrance of the guests, with dishes, as high as a tall man could well reach, filled with the choicest viands sea or land could afford: and all this once seen, and having feasted the eyes of the invited, was in a manner thrown away, and fresh set on to the same height, having only this advantage of the other, that it was hot.