The English Spy, page 429 by Bernard Blackmantle
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ns.' 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. Kitchener rooted up all my prejudices, and overturned the whole system of my theory by practical illustrations.
"Thus he that's wealthy, if he's wise, Commands an earthly paradise; That happy station nowhere found, But where the glass goes freely round. Then give us wine, to drown the cares Of life in our declining years, That we may gain, if Heav'n think fitting, By drinking, what was lost by eating: For though mankind for that offence Were doom'd to labour ever since, Yet Mercy has the grape impower'd To sweeten what the apple sour'd."
To this good-humoured sally of Pendragon succeeded a long dissertation on meats, which it is not meet I should relate, being for the most part idle conceits of Mr. Galen Cornaro, who carried about him a lon