Ah! but the card? you ask. Yes, here it is.
--------------------------------
| |
| NAPHTALI RINK, |
| 51 Early Avenue. |
| (At the Hygienic Institute.) |
| |
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Of course, this is only in miniature, and represents every way but a
very small part of the document, the address being but a drop in the
superscriptive surge,--a rivulet of text meandering through a meadow of
marginalia. Inasmuch as Duespeptos courted the widest publicity for
these stomachic scraps, no scruples of delicacy forbid me to jot down
here some few of them. He thought them fitted for the race,--the more
readers the better: perhaps it may be, the more the merrier. If called
upon to classify them, I should put them all under the genus Gastric
Scholia. The different species and varieties it is hardly worth while to
enter upon here. There were intuitions, recollections, and glosses,
apparently set down in a fragmentary way from time to time, in a most
minute and distinct text. Very probably they were hints of thoughts
designed to be worked up in a more formal way. Whether the quotations
were taken at first or second hand I cannot say; but internal evidence
would seem to indicate that many of them might have been clippings from
the columns of "The Old Lancaster Day-Book." It is, perhaps, worthy of
note that Mr. Rink was, in fact, a man of rather more thought and
general information than one might suppose, if judging him merely by his
uncouth grammar, and the clipped coin of his jangling speech:--
"His voice was nasal with the twang
That spoiled the hymns when Cromwell's army sang."
Now, then, O reader, returning from this feast of fat things, I lay
before you the scraps.
* * * * *
"Character is Digestion."
"There's been a good deal of high-fangled nonsense written about genius.
One man says it's in the head; another, that it comes from the heart,
etc., etc. The fact is, they're all wrong. Genius lies in the stomach.
Who ever knew a fat genius? Now there's De Quincey,--he says, in his
outlandish way, that genius is the synthesis of the intellect with the
moral nature. No such thing; and a man who sinned day and night against
his stomach, and swilled opium as he did, couldn't be expected to know.
If there's any synthesis at all about it, it's the synthesis of the
stomach with the liver."
"What a complete knowledge of human nature Sam Slick shows, when he
says, 'A bilious cheek and a sour temper are like the Siamese twins:
there's a nateral cord of union atween them. The one is a sign with the
name of the firm written on it in long letters.'"
"The French are a mighty cute people. They know a thing or two about as
well as the next man. There's a heap of truth and poetry in these maxims
of one of their writers: 'Indigestion is the remorse of a guilty
stomach'; 'Happiness consists in a hard heart and a good digestion.'"
"The old tempter--the original Jacobs--was called in Hebrew a _nachash_,
so I'm told. But folks don't seem to understand exactly what this
_nachash_ was. Some say it was a rattlesnake, some a straddle-bug. Old
Dr. Adam Clarke, I've heard, vowed it was a monkey. They're all out of
their reckoning. It's as plain as a pikestaff that it was nothing but
Fried Fat cooked up to order, and it's been a-tempting weak sisters ever
since. That's what's the matter."
"Let me make the bran-bread of a nation, and I care not who makes its
laws."
"It makes me master-sick to hear all these fellows who've just made out
to scrape together a few postage-stamps laying down their three-cent
notions about the way to get on in the world, the rules for success, and
all that. Just as if a couple of greenbacks could make a blind man see
clean through a millstone! They're like these old nursing grannies: No.
1 thinks catnip is the only thing; No. 2 believes there's nothing like
sage-tea and mustard-poultice; No. 3 swears by burdock. The truth
is,--and men might as well own up to it first as last,--success depends
on bile."
"Shakspeare was a man who was pretty well posted in human nature all
round,--knew the kitchen about as well as the parlor. He knocks on the
head the sin of stuffing, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' where he
speaks of the man that 'dies with feeding his own stomach.' In 'Timon of
Athens' there's a chap who 'greases his pure mind,' probably with fried
sausages, gravy, and such like trash. The fellow in 'Macbeth' who has
'eaten of the insane root' was meant, I calculate, as a hard rap on
tobacco-chewers (and smokers too); he called it _root_, instead of
_leaf_, just to cover up his tracks. What a splendid thought that is in
'Love's Labor's Lost': 'Fat paunches have lean pates'! Everybody knows
how Julius Caesar turned up his nose at fat men. The poet never could
stand frying; he calls it, in 'Macbeth,' 'the young fry of treachery.'
Probably he'd had more taste of the traitor than was good for him. Has a
good slap somewhere on the critter that 'devours up all the fry it
finds.' I reckon that Shakspeare always set a proper valuation on human
digestion; 'cause when he speaks of a man with a good stomach,--an
excellent stomach,--he always has a good word for him, and kind of
strokes down his fur the right way of the grain; but he comes down
dreadful strong on the lout that has no stomach, as he calls it. In
'Henry IV.,' he says, 'the cook helps to make the gluttony.' I estimate
that that one sentence alone, if he'd never writ another word, would
have made him immortal. If I had my way, I'd have it printed in gold
letters a foot long, and sot up before every cook-stove in the land. But
just see what a man he was! This very same play that tells the disease
prescribes the cure, that is, 'the remainder-biscuit,'--a knock-down
proof to any man with a knowledge-box that Graham-bread was known and
appreciated in those days, and that Shakspeare himself had cut his own
eye-teeth on it."
"A broken heart is only another name for an everlasting indigestion."
"History is merely a record of indigestions,--a calendar of the foremost
stomachs of the age. The destinies of nations hang on the bowels of
princes. Internal wars come from intestine rebellion. The rising within
is father to the insurrection without. The fountain of a national crisis
is always found under the waistcoat of one man. There's Napoleon
I.,--what settled him for good was just that greasy mutton-chop stewed
up in onions, which he took for his grub at Leipsic. If he'd only
ordered a couple of slices of dry Graham-toast, with a cup of weak black
tea, he'd have saved his stomach, and whipped 'em, sure; and matters and
things in Europe would have had a different look all round ever since."
"Emerson is a man who once in a while gets a little inkling of the
truth. I see he says that the creed lies in the biliary duct. That's
good orthodox doctrine, I don't care who says it."
"Buckwheat-cakes are now leading us back to barbarism faster than the
printing-press ever carried us forward towards civilization."
"Temperament means nothing more nor less than just quantity and quality
of bile. That old sawbones, Hippocrates, came mighty near hitting the
nail square on the head more 'n two thousand year ago, but he felt kind
of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old
heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,--the sanguineous,
phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more
on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked
the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different
ways of modifying bile with fat."
"Every man is dyspeptic. Tell me his dyspepsy, and I'll tell you what he
is."
"In sick-headache, a heaping tablespoonful each of salt and common
mustard, stirred into a pint of hot water, and drank without breathing,
will generally produce an immediate effect. (_Mem._ But Graham-biscuit
is better in the long run.)"
"Society is the meeting of a gang of incurables, who come together to
talk over their dyspepsies. And everybody takes his turn in furnishing
fodder to keep the thing going hot-foot."
"Professor Bache says sea-sickness comes from the head, 'cause a man
gets dizzy in trying to get used to the teetering of the ship. All
nonsense. The Professor may be posted in the survey of the coast, but he
don't know the lay of the land in the interior. Sea-sickness comes from
the stomach: just offer a man a mouthful of fried salt pork."
"It's stated that some old bookworm of a Dutchman, with a jaw-breaking
name that I can't recollect, has an idea, that, 'if we could penetrate
into the secret foundations of human events, we should frequently find
the misfortunes of one man caused by the intestines of another.' There's
not the least doubt of it,--true of one man or a million."
"Fate is Fat: Fat is Fate."