in sitting still in that course
of life wherein they have been bred and trained up; change, be it what it
will, distempers and puts one out. Do you believe that chestnuts can
hurt a Perigordin or a Lucchese, or milk and cheese the mountain people?
We enjoin them not only a new, but a contrary, method of life; a change
that the healthful cannot endure. Prescribe water to a Breton of
threescore and ten; shut a seaman up in a stove; forbid a Basque footman
to walk: you will deprive them of motion, and in the end of air and
light:

"An vivere tanti est?
Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,
Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus. .
Hos superesse reor, quibus et spirabilis aer
Et lux, qua regimur, redditur ipsa gravis."

["Is life worth so much? We are compelled to withhold the mind
from things to which we are accustomed; and, that we may live, we
cease to live . . . . Do I conceive that they still live, to
whom the respirable air, and the light itself, by which we are
governed, is rendered oppressive?"
--Pseudo-Gallus, Eclog., i. 155, 247.]

If they do no other good, they do this at least, that they prepare
patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting
off the use of life.

Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered myself to obey the
appetites that pressed upon me. I give great rein to my desires and
propensities; I do not love to cure one disease by another; I hate
remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself. To be
subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two
evils instead of one; the disease torments us on the one side, and the
remedy on the other. Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us
rather run the hazard of a mistake, after we have had the pleasure. The
world proceeds quite the other way, and thinks nothing profitable that is
not painful; it has great suspicion of facility. My appetite, in various
things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the
health of my stomach. Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me
when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently
followed. Wine is hurtful to sick people, and 'tis the first thing that
my mouth then finds distasteful, and with an invincible dislike.
Whatever I take against my liking does me harm; and nothing hurts me t