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822 year Cornaro had accustomed himself to a daily measure of twelve ounces of food and fourteen of drink—which does not, I own, convey a very exact notion to me, though I take it we Gargantuans should find the measure small. He does not seem to have been particular what he ate, and he did not shun wine. "I chose that wine," he says, "which fitted my stomach and in such measure as easily might be digested." He found it no labor to write immediately after meals. On the contrary, his spirits were then so brisk that he had to sing a song to get rid of his superfluous energies before sitting down to his desk. Lessius is loath to commit himself to any certain scale: "If thou dost usually take so much food at meals as thou art thereby made unfit for the duties and offices belonging to the mind, . . . it is then evident that thou dost exceed the measure which thou oughtest to hold." He tells, on ancient authority, some marvelous tales of the little men have found enough to keep body and soul together: how one throve through a long life on milk alone, how another lived for twenty years on cheese. In monasteries and in the universities this desired measure is, he says, more easily to be found, for there either the statutes of the societies, or the "discreet orders of the superiors" have ordained the quantities of wine and beer that are fit to be drunk. Of monasteries I have no experience, but in the universities I have been given to understand that it is (or was, for the old order changes now so fast that it is hard to say what a day may not bring forth) the custom to leave such matters mainly to the discreetness of the students—which, it may be, is like Goethe's poetry, not always inevitable enough. On the whole, Lessius seems to incline to Cornaro's allowance as sufficient, and perhaps as good an average as it is possible to strike. But he insists, as do all these antique sages, that the measure must vary with the age, condition, and business of the man. No hard and fast rule can there be. The golden mean must vary in all sorts of people, "according to the diversity of complexions in sundry persons, and of youth and strength in the selfsame body." And again: "A greater measure is requisite to him that is occupied in bodily labor and continually exercising the faculties of the body than to him that is altogether in studies." On this point all are agreed; on this and, I am sorry to say, on one other: qui medice vivit, misere vivit, "it is a miserable life to live after the physician's forescript."

It will, then, be seen that our forefathers were by no means so negligent of this thing as Sir Henry Thompson fancies. If they were not so minute and curious as we now are, they took at least a broad and liberal view, and surely a most wise one. It is, indeed, his general acceptance of this view which gives Sir Henry's utterances more value than those some of his brethren have put forth. "In matters of diet," run his wise words, "many persons have individual peculiarities; and while certain fixed principles exist as absolutely cardinal in the detail of their application to each man's wants, an infinity of stomach