A WORD OR TWO TOUCHING EVERY MAN^S MASTER. 279 



paralyse the power of the most healthy stomach, as effectually, if we 

 indulge to the same extent, as the change from joy to grief; and few 

 of us are so supremely happy as not to have experienced this in our 

 own persons. So capricious is nature, that we have seen the young, 

 the old, the weakly, and the robust, feast one day upon that which 

 the next they would loathe j and cheese, the horror of dietetists, we 

 have seen relished at a time when the lightest animal or vegetable 

 matter could not be endured. We have before us the case of an old 

 man, seventy years of age, who, for the last three or four years of his 

 life, could take no other supper than cheese, and of which he never 

 eat less than a quarter of a pound, and heard him repeatedly declare 

 that it was the only meal which he found light and easy of digestion. 

 He always slept well, and woke with an appetite. This is a fact de- 

 serving consideration. 



To propose dietetical regimen for people already in the enjoyment 

 of high health, would be absurd ; it would be to render art superior 

 to nature. In those occasional abberrations from a regular mode of 

 life, to which all men are more or less at times exposed, art may, 

 and doubtless does, effect important changes. But to suppose her 

 operations paramount, would be a doctrine too absurd even for Para- 

 celsus to maintain. 



If people would but reflect a little on the laws which regulate the 

 organic world that every body has its period of growth, maturity, 

 and decay ; and in proportion as we approach the last stage, the 

 energies of life diminish beyond the power of human ingenuity to 

 renovate they would act with more prudence by regulating their 

 diet, not on dietetic principles, which have reference to positive dis- 

 ease, but on principles which have reference to one or other of those 

 climacterick periods. The climax of maturity being passed, nature, 

 as if conscious of having performed her work, now waits as a passive, 

 but not an indifferent spectator, the ruin of that noble edifice which 

 she has constructed ; and as if unwilling that it should crumble into 

 premature decay, by fits and starts resumes her restorative power, 

 as is often manifest in the temporary convalescences ; until at length 

 exhausted, or indifferent to further efforts, she waits, like the Roman 

 senators in the capitol, the approach of that awful moment which 

 opens to her the mysteries of another world. 



Nothing shews the vanity, or rather the folly of man so clearly 

 as his wish to ascribe to other than the real causes, those deep and 

 lasting impressions which the heavy hand of time impresses on us ; 

 deluding ourselves into the belief that every change of health arises 

 from some aberration in diet, forgetting the influence of increasing 

 years, and subscribe to the doctrines of the modern dietetists, who, 

 promising to their followers eternal life, exhibit, like Paracelsus, in 

 their own persons the sad exception to their visionary schemes. To 

 people in health, dietetics are unnecessary; the mode of living which 

 established health is the most likely to maintain it. To all with 

 whom positive disease does not exist, or where the taste and appetite 

 are uot vitiated, we would say consult your feelings. The ease with 

 which a favourite meal is digested is familiar to all. Where disease 

 does not exist, but were there is some deviation from ordinary health, 



