piece of well made and well baked brown
bread would be often the best breakfast for my young master. I am sure
it is as wholesome, and will make him as strong a man, as greater
delicacies; and if he be used to it, it will be as pleasant to him.

"If he, at any time, call for victuals between meals, use him to nothing
but dry bread. If he be hungry more than wanton, bread will go down; and
if he be not hungry, it is not fit that he should eat. By this you will
obtain two good effects. First, that by custom he will come to be in
love with bread; for, as I said, our palates and stomachs, too, are
pleased with the things we are used to. Another good you will gain
hereby is, that you will not teach him to eat more nor oftener than
nature requires.

"I do not think that all people's appetites are alike; some have
naturally stronger and some weaker stomachs. But this I think, that
many are made gormands and gluttons by custom, that were not so by
nature. And I see, in some countries, men as lusty and strong, that eat
but two meals a day, as those that have set their stomachs, by a
constant usage, to call on them for four or five.

"The Romans usually fasted till supper, the only set meal, even of those
who ate more than once in a day; and those who used breakfasts, as some
did at eight, same at ten, others at twelve of the clock, and some
later, neither ate flesh nor had anything made ready for them.

"Augustus, when the greatest monarch on the earth, tells us he took a
piece of dry bread in his chariot; and Seneca, in his 83d epistle,
giving an account how be managed himself when he was old, and his age
permitted indulgence, says that he used to eat a piece of dry bread for
his dinner, without the formality of sitting to it. Yet Seneca, as it is
well known, was wealthy.

"The masters of the world were brought up with this spare diet, and the
young gentlemen of Rome felt no want of strength or spirit because they
ate but once a day. Or if it happened by chance that any one could not
fast so long as till supper, their only set meal, he took nothing but a
bit of dry bread, or at most a few raisins or some such slight thing
with it, to stay his stomach. And more than one set meal a day was
thought so monstrous that it was a reproach, as low as Caesar's time, to
make an entertainment, or sit down to a table, till towards sunset.
Therefore I judge it most convenient that my young master should have
nothing but bread for breakf