Pendragon, "while
you are running through the merits of drinking. Does not Rabelais
contend that good wine is the best physic?' because there are more old
tipplers than old physicians.' Custom is every thing; only get well
seasoned at the first start, and all the rest of life is a summer's
scene. Snymdiris the
Sybarite never once saw the sun rise or set during a course of twenty
years; yet he lived to a good old age, drank like a centaur, and never
went to bed sober."
And when his glass was out, he fell Like some ripe kernel from its
shell.
"I was once an anti-gastronomist and a rigid antisaccharinite; sugar and
milk were banished from my breakfast-table, vegetables and puddings
my only diet, until I almost ceased to vegetate, and my cranium was
considered as soft as a custard; and curst hard it was to cast off all
culinary pleasures, sweet reminiscences of my infancy, commencing with
our first spoonful of pap, for all young protestants are papists; to
this day my heart (like Wordsworth's) ~108~~overflows at the sight of
a pap-boat--the boat a child first mans; to speak naughty-cally, as
a nurse would say, how many a row is there in the pap-boat--how many
squalls attend it when first it comes into contact with the skull! But I
am now grown corpulent; in those days I was a lighter-man, and I believe
I should have continued to live (exist) upon herbs and roots; but Dr.
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