Ovid, Horace, and Virgil all frequented the tables of the great; Cato
warmed his virtue with wine; Shakspeare kept up his _verve_ with stolen
venison; Steele and Addison wrote their best papers over a bottle; Sir
Walter Scott is famed for good housekeeping; and I know authors who love
to dine like lords. Even booksellers do their spiriting more gently for
good fare, and bid for an author the most spiritedly after dinner.
There is not a more vulgar mistake than that of confounding good eating
with gluttony and excess. It is not because a man gets twenty or
five-and-twenty guineas per sheet for a dashing article, and has taste
to expend his well-earned cash upon a cook who knows how to dress a
dinner, that he is necessarily to gorge himself like a mastiff with
sheep's paunch. On the contrary, if he means to preserve the powers of
his palate intact, he must "live cleanly as a nobleman should do." The
fat-witted people in the City are not nice in their eating, quantity
being more closely considered by them than quality. There is, I admit,
something in the good man's concluding conjecture, that "the sort of
diet men observe influences their style." I should know an "heavy-wet"
man at the third line; and I can tell to a nicety when Theodore Hook
writes upon claret, and when he is inspired by the over-heating and
acrimonious stimulus of Max. Hayley obviously composed upon tea and
bread and butter. Dr. Philpots may be nosed a mile off for priestly port
and the fat bulls of Basan; and Southey's Quarterly articles are written
on an empty stomach, and before his crudities, like the breath of Sir
Roger de Coverley's barber, have been "mollified by a breakfast."--_New
Monthly Mag._
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