THE PHILOSOPHY OF DIET. 823 



tricities is to be reckoned on. The old proverb expresses the fact 

 strongly but truly, ' What is one man's meat is another man's poison.' 

 Yet nothing is more common and one rarely leaves a social dinner- 

 table without observing it than to hear some good-natured person 

 recommending to his neighbor, with a confidence rarely found except 

 in alliance with profound ignorance of the matter in hand, some spe- 

 cial form of food, or drink, or system of diet, solely because the ad- 

 viser happens to have found it useful to himself." It is not only the 

 good-natured companion of the dinner-table who errs this way. He 

 were an ungrateful churl who would willingly say a harsh word about 

 our ministers of the interior, so sympathetic, so patient, so courteous, 

 so generous ! Yet it must be owned that they are, some of them, a 

 little apt to leave out of sight the varieties of the human constitution, 

 to take all human stomachs as framed on one fixed primordial pattern ; 

 above all are they, as old Lessius complained, too likely to " bring 

 men into a labyrinth of care in the observation, and unto perfect slav- 

 ery in the endeavoring to perform what they do in this matter enjoin." 

 Sometimes I think they do but flatter the weakness of humanity, and 

 when they meet salute each other as the old augurs used. There are 

 folk who will not so much as take a pill at their own venture, and 

 never fulfill an invitation to dinner without a visit to the doctor next 

 morning. He can not afford to drive such inquisitive fools from his 

 door ; and so it may be that the healing hand, like the dyer's, becomes 

 subdued to what it works in. The answer given by his physician to 

 Falstaff, on his page's authority, is one it were hardly wise to risk 

 to-day. 



I have tried to show that our old forefathers were not so careless 

 of their peptics as has been thought. Yet there was a later time 

 when they were sadly reckless in such matters, and possibly the chronic 

 dyspepsia from which our race seems to suffer to-day may be the heri- 

 tage of that recklessness. " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and 

 the children's teeth are set on edge." Certainly our stomachs are 

 more bounded than was Wolsey's. To read the domestic annals of 

 the close of the last and the early years of this century brings back 

 the Homeric tales of the strength and prowess of the heroes who 

 warred on the plains of Troy. No man of these degenerate days 

 could do the work our fathers did, who " gloried and drank deep " 

 like those lusty Jamschyds. They had, to be sure, some few points in 

 their favor that we lack. They did not need at least they did not 

 use those intermittent aids to the agreeableness of life that we seem 

 to find so necessary. There were no brandies-and-soclas, no sherries- 

 and-bitters, no five-o'clock teas ; they were content with one solid meal 

 in the day, and they did not put that off till it was growing time 

 to begin to think about bed. And, I suspect, the most important 

 point of all, they took life less hastily not less seriously, but less 

 hastily. Their brains were not always at high pressure ; they did not 



