Philotus Wantley demurred, not on account of the sex, for
he could assure us he was a fervent admirer, but having studied the
wise maxims of Pythagoras, and being a disciple of the Brahma school,
abominators of flesh and strong liquors, he hoped to be excused, by
drinking the ladies in _aqua pura_.--" Water is a monstrous drink for
Christians!" said the alderman, "the sure precursor of coughs, colds,
consumptions, agues, dropsies, pleurisies, and spleen. I never knew
a water-drinker in my life that was ever a fellow of any spirit, mere
morbid anatomies, starvelings and hypochondriacs: your water-drinkers
never die of old age, but melancholy."--"Right, right, alderman," said
Mr. Pendragon; "a cup of generous wine is, in my opinion, excellent
physic; it makes a man lean, and reduces him to friendly dependence on
every thing that bars his way: sometimes it is a little grating to
his feelings, to be sure, but it generally passes off with an hic-cup.
According to Galen, sir, the waters of _Astracan_ breed worms in
those who taste them; those ~104~~of _Verduri_, the fairest river in
Macedonia, make the cattle who drink of them black, while those of
Peleca, in Thessaly, turn every thing white; and Bodine states that the
stuttering of the families of Aquatania, about Labden, is entirely owing
to their being water-drinkers: a man might as well drink of the river
Styx as the river Thames, '_Stygio monstrum conforme paludi_,' a
monstrous drink, thickened by the decomposition of dead Christians and
dead brutes, and purified by the odoriferous introduction of gas water
and puddle water, joined to a pleasant and healthy amalgamation of all
the impurities of the common sewers.
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