Eats his children, as the poets say Saturn did, and carries his felicity
and all his concernments in his paunch. If he had lived when all the
members of the body rebelled against the stomach there had been no
possibility of accommodation. His entrails are like the sarcophagus,
that devours dead bodies in a small space, or the Indian zampatan, that
consumes flesh in a moment. He is a great dish made on purpose to carry
meat. He eats out his own head, and his horses' too; he knows no grace
but grace before meat, nor mortification but in fasting. If the body be
the tabernacle of the soul, he lives in a sutler's hut. He celebrates
mass, or rather mess, to the idol in his belly, and, like a papist, eats
his adoration. A third course is the third heaven to him, and he is
ravished into it. A feast is a good conscience to him, and he is
troubled in mind when he misses of it. His teeth are very industrious in
their calling, and his chops like a Bridewell perpetually hatcheling. He
depraves his appetite with _haut-gousts_, as old fornicators do their
lechery into fulsomeness and stinks. He licks himself into the shape of
a bear, as those beasts are said to do their whelps. He new forms
himself in his own belly, and becomes another thing than God and Nature
meant him. His belly takes place of the rest of his members, and walks
before in state. He eats out that which eats all things else--time--and
is very curious to have all things in season at his meals but his hours,
which are commonly at midnight, and so late that he prays too late for
his daily bread, unless he mean his natural daily bread. He is admirably
learned in the doctrines of meats and sauces, and deserves the chair in
_juris-prudentia_; that is, in the skill of pottages. At length he eats
his life out of house and home and becomes a treat for worms, sells his
clothes to feed his gluttony, and eats himself naked, as the first of
his family, Adam, did.