re's nothing like
sage-tea and mustard-poultice; No. 3 swears by burdock. The truth
is,--and men might as well own up to it first as last,--success depends
on bile."

"Shakspeare was a man who was pretty well posted in human nature all
round,--knew the kitchen about as well as the parlor. He knocks on the
head the sin of stuffing, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' where he
speaks of the man that 'dies with feeding his own stomach.' In 'Timon of
Athens' there's a chap who 'greases his pure mind,' probably with fried
sausages, gravy, and such like trash. The fellow in 'Macbeth' who has
'eaten of the insane root' was meant, I calculate, as a hard rap on
tobacco-chewers (and smokers too); he called it _root_, instead of
_leaf_, just to cover up his tracks. What a splendid thought that is in
'Love's Labor's Lost': 'Fat paunches have lean pates'! Everybody knows
how Julius Caesar turned up his nose at fat men. The poet never could
stand frying; he calls it, in 'Macbeth,' 'the young fry of treachery.'
Probably he'd had more taste of the traitor than was good for him. Has a
good slap somewhere on the critter that 'devours up all the fry it
finds.' I reckon that Shakspeare always set a proper valuation on human
digestion; 'cause when he speaks of a man with a good stomach,--an
excellent stomach,--he always has a good word for him, and kind of
strokes down his fur the right way of the grain; but he comes down
dreadful strong on the lout that has no stomach, as he calls it. In
'Henry IV.,' he says, 'the cook helps to make the gluttony.' I estimate
that that one sentence alone, if he'd never writ another word, would
have made him immortal. If I had my way, I'd have it printed in gold
letters a foot long, and sot up before every cook-stove in the land. But
just see what a man he was! This very same play that tells the disease
prescribes the cure, that is, 'the remainder-biscuit,'--a knock-down
proof to any man with a knowledge-box that Graham-bread was known and
appreciated in those days, and that Shakspeare himself had cut his own
eye-teeth on it."

"A broken heart is only another name for an everlasting indigestion."

"History is merely a record of indigestions,--a calendar of the foremost
stomachs of the age. The destinies of nations hang on the bowels of
princes. Internal wars come from intestine rebellion. The rising within
is father to the insurrection without. The fountain of a national crisis
is always found under the waist