fiction could not
endure above a year or two. I ceased to grow, but, alas! I did not
cease my demands for alimentary sustenance.

Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased to exist
the fond concealment--the indulgent blindness--the delicate
overlooking--the compassionate fiction. I and my infirmity are left
exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which
nothing can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a
balance; that which appetite demands is set down to the account of
gluttony--a sin which my whole soul abhors--nay, which Nature herself
has put it out of my power to commit. I am constitutionally
disenabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of excess who
never can get enough? Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and
leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of
fragments, and the supernaturally replenished cup of old Baucis: and
be thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue,
have saved them from the like reproaches. I do not see that any of
them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one
calls it, is supplied. Alas! I am doomed to stop short of that
continence.

What am I to do? I am by disposition inclined to conviviality and the
social meal. I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I should
despise the board of Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting. Those
vivacious, long-continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed, I
justly envy; but the kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up
with, I could be content with. Dentatus I have been called, among
other unsavory jests. Doublemeal is another name which my
acquaintance have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy
which I put in practice for some time without being found out; which
was--going the round of my friends, beginning with the most primitive
feeders among them, who take their dinner about one o'clock, and so
successively dropping in upon the next and the next, till by the time
I got among my more fashionable intimates, whose hour was six or
seven, I have nearly made up the body of a just and complete meal (as
I reckon it), without taking more than one dinner (as they account of
dinners) at one person's house. Since I have been found out, I
endeavor to make up by a damper, as I call it, at home, before I go
out. But, alas! with me, increase of appetite truly grows by what it
feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to me at t