e list, though there be many and
very costly dishes set before them, yet take more content in employing
their time in commanding their poor wives to some of their friends,
yea, and in conferring freedom on their slaves, than in gratifying their
stomachs. But should the pleasures of the body be allowed to have some
extraordinary matter in them, this would yet be common to men of action
and business.

For they can eat good meat, and red wine drink,
(See "Iliad," v. 341.)

aye, and entertain themselves with their friends, and perhaps with a
greater relish too, after their engagements and hard services,--as
did Alexander and Agesilaus, and (by Jove) Phocion and Epaminondas
too,--than these gentlemen who anoint themselves by the fireside, and
are gingerly rocked about the streets in sedans. Yea, those make but
small account of such pleasures as these, as being comprised in those
greater ones. For why should a man mention Epaminondas's denying to sup
with one, when he saw the preparations made were above the man's
estate, but frankly saying to his friend, "I thought you had intended a
sacrifice and not a debauch," when Alexander himself refused Queen Ada's
cooks, telling her he had better ones of his own, to wit, travelling
by night for his dinner, and a light dinner for his supper, and when
Philoxenus writing to him about some handsome boys, and desiring to know
of him whether he would have him buy them for him, was within a small
matter of being discharged his office for it? And yet who might better
have them than he? But as Hippocrates saith that of two pains the lesser
is forgot in the greater, so the pleasures that accrue from action and
the love of glory, while they cheer and refresh the mind, do by their
transcendency and grandeur obliterate and extinguish the inferior
satisfactions of the body.

If, then, the remembering of former good things (as they affirm) be that
which most contributes to a pleasurable living, not one of us will then
credit Epicurus when he, tells us that, while he was dying away in the
midst of the strongest agonies and distempers, he yet bore himself up
with the memory of the pleasures he formerly enjoyed. For a man may
better see the resemblance of his own face in a troubled deep or a
storm, than a smooth and smiling remembrance of past pleasure in a body
tortured with such lancing and rending pains. But now the memories of
past actions no man can put from him that would. For did Al