Comments on Corpulency, "SB 



He found what might be considered the fashionables of that 

 part of the world, so vitiated in their appetites, that they could 

 relish no other food, and that they would have swallowed the 

 Missionary much sooner than his doctrines. The royal person 

 tvho ruled over them was always afflicted with a pain in his 

 stomach, whenever he ate any other than human flesh. A bit 

 of an enemy was considered a treat ; and whenever his majesty 

 went to war, besides the ready ** sauce piquante" of malignant 

 feelings, he was furnished with salt and lemon-juice. 



It does not, however, appear that these Anthropophagi were 

 corpulent, any more than the French prisoner who ate sixteen 

 pounds of raw beef, and other great eaters of meat ; whose 

 whole history proves, that the ** coenas sine sanguine," of Ho- 

 race, possessed more materia pinguefaciendi. 



While we congratulate ourselves on the diminution of mor- 

 tality, which has accompanied the improvements in the con- 

 dition of society, — our pleasure is alloyed by the reflection, that 

 considerable deduction is to be made in our estimate, according 

 to the mercantile phrase, of profit and loss, by the increase of 

 a set of diseases, which are to be attributed to the augmentation 

 of national wealth, with its concomitants, luxury and high- 

 living. 



Thus, instead of finding the annual bills of mortality an- 

 nouncing in the deadly list, plague, pestilence, and famine, — 

 not forgetting small-pox, — we read gout, apoplexy, palsy, and 

 even obesity, and a host of minor evils connected with re- 

 pletion. 



Among the grievous calamities incident to corpulency, no- 

 ticed in a former publication, was its susceptibility of contagion 

 and its proneness to combustion, — and an instance was men- 

 tioned of a French lady whose fat caught fire. The Margra- 

 vine of Bareuth also notices a fat French princess who melted 

 after she was embalmed. I have since discovered, in the Chro- 

 nicles of Cromwell's time, that these combustible materials iri 

 man, were turned to good account in those days, and that a 

 woman who kept a tallow chandler's shop in Dublin, made all 

 her best candles from the fat of Englishmen, and when one 

 of her customers complained of their not being so good as 

 usual, she apologized by saying,^* Why, ma'am, I am sorry to 



