which will nourish and perfectly agree with one person, would prove highly pernicious to another. Let us, therefore, in the selection of our food, adopt that which long and careful observation has confirmed to be salutary, and avoid those things, however tempting to the palate, which we know to be injurious.

There are, however, articles of diet obviously improper to every one; which, though they may not manifest their ill effects immediately, yet, nevertheless, undermine and break down by gradual operation, the vigour of our systems, and entail upon us, with certainty, a train of chronic disorders, of all others the most troublesome and difficult to cure. The articles of this description are all high-seasoned dishes, and those which are composed of a great variety of ingredients. People in health require no excitement to the relish of good and wholesome meat; and to those in the opposite state, the luxuries of the table are poison. The sad effects of luxury are these;

We drink our poison, and we eat disease.

Not so, O Temperance bland; when ruled by thee,
The brute's obedient, and the man is free:

Soft are his slumbers, balmy is his rest,

His veins not boiling from the midnight feast.

Tis to thy rules, bright Temperance! we owe

All pleasures which from strength and health can flow;
Vigour of body, purity of mind,

Unclouded reason, sentiments refined;

Unmix'd, untainted joys, without remorse,

The intemperate sensualist's never-failing curse.

DODD.

There are three kinds of appetite: first, the natural appetitewhich is equally stimulated and satisfied with the most simple. dish, as with the most palatable; second, the artificial appetite, or that excited by bitters, spirits, pickles, and other condiments, which remain only as long as the operation of these stimulants continues; third, the habitual appetite, or that by which we accustom ourselves to take victuals at certain hours, and frequently without any appetite. Longing for a particular food is likewise a kind of false appetite.

By the true and healthy appetite alone, can we ascertain the quantity of aliment proper for the individual. If, in that state,

we no longer relish a common dish, it is a certain evidence of its disagreeing with our digestive organs. If, after dinner, we feel ourselves as cheerful as before it, we may be assured that we have taken a proper meal; for, if the proper measure be exceeded, torper will ensue, with indigestion, and a variety of unplea sant complaints.

When the tired glutton labours through a treat,
He finds no relish in the sweetest meat.
Then hear what blessings Temperance can bring,
Those blessings, only, form my cause to sing;
First Health-the stomach cramm'd from every dish,
A tomb of roast and boil'd, of flesh and fish,
Where bile and wind, and phlegm and acid jar,
And all the man is one intestine war,
Remembers well the school-boy's simple fare,
The temperate sleeps, and spirits light as air.

POPE.

A decent, well-furnished and hospitable table, is very commendable in those who can afford it. It speaks the greatness of their minds, the goodness of their natures, and gains the blessing of the poor and needy, where they are charitably allowed to come in for a share; but, when feasting runs into excessive luxury and vain expense, it reproaches the author of it with prodigality and folly; for no money can be so truly said to be thrown away, as that which is superfluously spent upon the belly.

It was a maxim of Socrates, " that we ought to eat and drink to live, and not to live in order to eat and drink." Temperance is the preservation of the dominion of soul over sense, of reason over passion. The want of it destroys health, fortune and conscience.

Chremes, of Greece, though a young man, was very infirm and sickly, through a course of luxury and intemperance; and subject to those strange sorts of fits which are called trances. In one of these, he thought that a philosopher came to sup with him; who out of all the dishes served up at the table, would only eat of one, and that the most simple; yet his conversation was sprightly, his knowledge great, his countenance cheerful, and his constitution strong. When the philosopher took his leave, he invited

Chremes to sup with him at a house in the neighbourhood; which also took place in his imagination; and he thought he was received with the most polite and affectionate tokens of friendship; but was greatly surprised, when supper came up, to find nothing but milk and honey, and a few roots dressed up in the plainest manner, to which cheerfulness and good sense were the only sauces. As Chremes was unused to this kind of diet, and could not eat, the philosopher ordered another table to be spread more to his taste; and immediately there succeeded a banquet composed of the most artificial dishes that luxury could invent, with great plenty and variety of the richest and most intoxicating wines.These, too, were accompanied by damsels of the most bewitching beauty. And now Chremes gave a loose to all his appetites; and every thing he tasted raised extacies beyond what he had ever known. During the repast the damsels sung and danced to entertain him. Their charms enchanted the enraptured guest, already heated with what he had drunk. His senses were lost in extatic confusion. Every thing around him seemed Elysium, and he was upon the point of indulging the most boundless freedom: when lo! on a sudden, their beauty, which was but a visor, fell off, and discovered to his view forms the most hideous and forbidding imaginable. Lust, revenge, folly, murder, meagre poverty, and frantic despair, now appeared in their most odious. shapes, and the place instantly became the direct scene of misery and desolation. How often did Chremes wish himself far distant from such diabolical company! and how dread the fatal consequences which threatened him on every side! His blood ran chill to his heart; his knees smote against each other with fear; and joy and rapture were turned into astonishment and horror.When the philosopher perceived that this scene had made a sufficient impression on his guest he thus addressed him: "Know Chremes, it is I, it is Esculapius, who has thus entertained you; and what you have here beheld is the true image of the deceitfulness and misery inseparable from luxury and intemperance.Would you be happy, be temperate. Temperance is the parent of health, virtue, wisdom, plenty, and of every thing that can render you happy in this world, or the world to come. It is, indeed, the true luxury of life; for without it life cannot be enjoy

ed." This said, he disappeared; and Chremes awaking, and instructed by the vision, altered his course of life, became frugal, temperate, industrious: and by that means so mended his health and estate, that he lived without pain to a very old age; and was esteemed one of the richest, best, and wisest men in Greece.

Such is the beautiful moral drawn by the pen of elegant and instructive fiction; with which, if there be any mind so insensible as not to be properly affected, let us only turn to that striking reality presented to us in the case of Lewis Cornaro. This gentleman was a Venitian of noble extraction, and memorable for having lived to an extreme old age; for he was above a hundred years old at the time of his death, which happened at Padua, in the year 1565. Amongst other little performances, he left behind him a picce entitled, "Of the advantages of a temperate life," of which we will here give our readers some account; not only because it will very well illustrate the life and character of the author, but may possibly be of use to those who take the summum bonum, or chief good of life, to consist in good eating. He was moved, it seems, to compose this little piece at the request, and for the benefit of some ingenuous young men, for whom he had a regard; and who, having long since lost their parents, and seeing him, then eightyone years old, in a fine florid state of health, were desirous to know of him, what had enabled him to preserve, as he did, a sound mind, in a sound body, to so extreme an age. He describes to them, therefore, his whole manner of living, and the regimen he had always pursued, and was then pursuing. He tells them that, when he was young, he was very intemperate; that his intemperance had brought upon him many and grievous disorders; that, from the thirty-fifth to the fortieth year of his age, he spent his nights and days in the utmost anxiety and pain; and that in short, his life was grown a burthen to him. The physicians, however, as he relates, notwithstanding all the vain and fruitless efforts which they had made to restore his health, told him that there was one method still remaining which had never been tried but which, if they could but prevail with him to use with perseverence, might free him, in time, om all his complaints; and that was a temperate and regular way of living. They added, moreover, that unless he resolved to apply instantly to it, his case would

soon become desperate, and there would be no hopes at all of his recovery. Upon this, he immediately prepared himself for his new regimen; and now began to eat and drink nothing but what was proper for one in his weak habit of body: but this was at first very disagreeable to him. He often wanted to live again in his old manner; and did, indeed, indulge himself in a freedom of diet sometimes, without the knowledge of his physician; but, as he informs us, much to his own detriment and uneasiness. Driven, in the mean time, by the necessity of the thing, and resolutely exerting all the powers of his understanding, he at last grew confirmed in a settled and uninterrupted course of temperance; by virtue of which, as he assures us, all his disorders had left him in less than a year: and he had been a firm and healthy man, from thenceforward, till the time in which he wrote, his treatise.

Some sensualists, as it appears, had objected to his abstemious manner of living; and in order to evince the reasonableness of their own, had urged that it was not worth while to mortify one's appetites at such a rate for the sake of being old, since all that was life, after the age of sixty-five, could not properly be called a living life, but a dead life. "Now," says he, "to show these gentlemen how much they are mistaken, I will briefly run over the satisfactions and pleasures which I myself enjoy in this eighty-third year of my age. In the first place, I am always well, and so active, withal, that I can, with ease, mount a horse upon a flat, or walk upon the tops of very high mountains. In the next place, I am always cheerful, pleasant, perfectly contented, and free from all perturbation, and every uneasy thought. I have none of that fastidium vitæ, that satiety of life, so often to be met with in persons of my age. I take a view of palaces, gardens, antiquities, public buildings, temples, fortifications, and endeavour to let nothing escape me which may afford the least amusement to a rational mind. Nor are these pleasures at all blunted by the usual imperfections of great age; for I enjoy all my senses in perfect vigour; my taste especially, in so high a degree, that I have a better relish for the plainest food now, than I had for the choicest delicacies formerly, when immersed in a life of luxury."