Swift is giving Pope a significant and not uncalled-for hint, when he writes to express his uneasiness at ever hearing of the poet's being out to dinner: "For the least transgression of yours, if it be only two bits and one sup more than your stint, is a great debauch; for which you certainly pay more than those sots who are carried dead drunk to bed." An entry in Mrs. Trench's diary begins, "Dined at the Duke of Queensberry's. He is very ill-has a violent cough, but will eat an immense dinner, and then complains of a digestion pénible." Another of his quality has been described as taking all sorts of pains to get a little enjoyment which must produce for him a world of misery. "One of his passions which he will not resist, is for a particular dish, pungent, savoury, and multifarious, which sends him almost every night into Tartarus." Mr. Thackeray's moribund old Madame Bernstein will have her supper luxurious, "nor could any injunction of ours or the doctor's teach her abstinence." The Sir Miles St. John of another popular fiction does himself to death after the same manner: "He would have his own way; and he contrived to coax or to force his doctor into an authority on his side." For doctors are not all of the kind that Sancho Panza had to deal with when governor of Barataria. The Doctor cites the case of an eminent member of "the faculty," who could never refrain from eating toasted cheese, though he was subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint which was uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated fatally at an age by no means advanced. Another he relates, of a physician who, at an autumnal dessert never ceased eating all the filberts he could lay his hands upon, while candidly acknowledging what indigestible and hurtful things they were. Not a doctor apparently of medicine, but (proh pudor !) of divinity, was that Cambridge don of whose end Gray makes memorable mention, as having gone to his grave with five fine mackarel (large and full of roe) in his inside. "He ate them all off at one dinner; but his fate was a turbot on Trinity Sunday, of which he left little for the company besides bones. He had not been hearty all the week; but after this sixth fish he never held up his head more." Like Milton's Eve, in one sense at least : "Greedily he ingorged without restraint, Dr. Johnson's friend, Thrale, is a noteworthy example, or warning, of the man of appetite, who will not restrain it; will not put a knife to his throat, but prefers sending a full laden fork in that direction. His wife describes his natural disposition to conviviality as degenerating into a preternatural desire for food. "No one could control his appetite." "Burney and I and Queeney tease him every meal he eats, and Mrs. Montagu is quite serious with him; but what can one do? He will eat, I think; and if he does eat, I know he will not live." The lampreys that were one too many for Henry the king, were one too many for Thrale the brewer. He begged some of an old friend, and the old friend complied, despite the frowns and negative signals of the ladies of the house-whom following out of the room, the too compliant visitor thus made his apology to Mrs. Thrale, "I understand you, Madam, but must disobey. A friend I have known thirty-six years shall not ask a favour of me in his last stage of life and be refused. What difference can it make?" Tears stood in his eyes, and Mrs. Thrale's own -les larmes dans la voix-prevented all reply. What difference did it make? That day was Mr. Thrale's last. The tone of the apology reminds us of General Paoli's answer to Boswell, when whispering his fear lest Johnson, very aged and very ailing, might be hurt by the amount and variety of what he was despatching at the general's table, "where he loved to dine." Boswell begged Paoli not to press him. Why urge a too willing horse?" Alas!" said the host, see how very ill he looks: he can live but a very short time. Would you refuse a slight gratification to a man under sentence of death ?” And the general cited approvingly the "humane custom" in Italy, by which those in Johnson's position were indulged with having whatever they liked best to eat and drink, even with expensive delicacies. A parallel case we have in Sir Walter Scott, during his melancholy sojourn in Italy, as Sir W. Gell describes his dining at a Roman palace, and his own fears lest, from the hospitality of the Torlonia family, and "with servants on all sides pressing him to eat and drink, as is their custom at Rome," Sir Walter might be induced to eat more than was safe for his malady. "Colonel Blair, who sat next him, was requested to take care that this should not happen. Whenever I observed him, however, Sir Walter appeared always to be eating; while the duchess, who had discovered the nature of the office imposed on the colonel, was by no means satisfied, and after dinner observed that it was an odd sort of friendship which consisted in starving one's neighbour to death, when he had a good appetite, and there was dinner enough." The selfish club-man par excellence has been depicted as earthing himself from pursuit in the sanctuary of his club, there to eat his fill unmolested, with no remonstrant at hand to remind him of the gout when enjoying his turtle, or to talk of cupping when the glass of champagne is at his lips. "There he may eat his asparagus tout à l'huile—there he may pepper his cream-tart," and none to say him nay. Drawn with pitiless realism from the life is Acton Bell (Anne Bronte)'s picture of the dying master of Wildfell Hall, whose extreme dread of death, when and while it seems imminent, renders easy his wife's task of curbing his unruly greed, but who becomes intractable as the danger to dear life seems receding. "I watch and restrain him," she writes, " as well as I can, and often get bitterly abused for my rigid severity; and sometimes he contrives to elude my vigilance, and sometimes acts in opposition to my will." William Collins, the painter, notes in his diary a certain "dinner at C's," where he "sat next to H- who took some highly seasoned omelet. I asked him how he could venture on such stuff; he said he could not resist it, though he knew how much he should suffer from it. He took a great deal of wine, to overcome the effects of the omelet, and assured me he should be ill for four days after such a dinner, and that he always suffered in the same way after dining with C― ! How absurd such weakness appears, and yet how common it is!" George Herbert's counsel is never out of date, any more than King Solomon's, in the matter of putting a knife to one's throat, if edacious and a diner-out : : "Look to thy mouth: diseases enter there.、. . Carve, or discourse; do not a famine fear. HAZAEL'S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS WHY 2 KINGS viii. 13. HY wept Elisha in the presence of Hazael, when that envoy from the sick king of Syria courted the man of God, in his sovereign's behalf, with a consignment of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels' burden? Courteous and gentle was Benhadad's messenger who came to inquire of the Lord of Elisha, if the royal Syrian should recover of the disease which had brought him so low. Why wept the prophet, when his prophecy had been uttered, ominously vague? "Go, say unto him [Benhadad], Thou mayest certainly recover. Howbeit the Lord hath showed me that he shall certainly die." And he settled his countenance stedfastly, until he was ashamed. "And Hazael said, Why weepeth my lord? And he answered, Because I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel; their strongholds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and wilt dash their children," etc. And Hazael said, "But what! is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?” Yet Hazael went home, and on the very morrow commenced his justification of the seer's previsionary tears, by spreading a thick wet cloth on the face of his master, so that Benhadad, who else would have recovered, died, and Hazael reigned in his stead. Well might the man of God weep, nor could anything be more natural, or at least naturally assumed, than the shuddering repudiation, the deprecating protest, of the envoy that now was, the king-and dog-that to-morrow should be. "Lui-même, à son portrait forcé de rendre hommage, Il frémira d'horreur devant sa propre image." The man who is weak, observes Miss Lee in the "Canterbury Tales," is always in danger of becoming a villain; and she exemplifies this liability in the instance of Villars, who, by indulging a passion calculated to enfeeble his understanding and corrupt his heart, is soon to be found touching that point which his high tone of romantic refinement had once induced him to believe it impossible he should even approach. But he protests too much who strenuously protests, with protestation heaped on protestation, against any such possible lapse and collapse on his part; and there are cases of this kind, of which one may say with Molière— "Que c'est être à demi ce que l'on vient de dire, Que de vouloir jurer qu'on ne le sera pas." Martial is in the right in answering the inquiry of Priscus, how would he live if he became rich and great all at once, with another query, Who can say beforehand what his future conduct will be? Quemquam posse putas mores narrare futuros? If Priscus were to become a lion, what sort of one would he turn out to be? Perhaps like Hazael, a dog. In sight of a corpse suspended to a tree, the "miserable remnant of a wretch that was hanged there for murder," Robert, in one of Tobin's dramas, protests to his mother that, robber though he be, he is no murderer; she replies: "You are a robber; And he who robs, by sharp resistance pressed, That has consigned him to yon blasted tree." Dr. Hamilton somewhere adverts to a sort of gambling in |