Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/843

Rh is to be reckoned on. The old proverb expresses the fact strongly but truly, 'What is one man's meat is another man's poison.' Yet nothing is more common—and one rarely leaves a social dinner table without observing it—than to hear some good-natured person recommending to his neighbor, with a confidence rarely found except in alliance with profound ignorance of the matter in hand, some special form of food, or drink, or system of diet, solely because the adviser happens to have found it useful to himself." It is not only the good-natured companion of the dinner-table who errs this way. He were an ungrateful churl who would willingly say a harsh word about our ministers of the interior, so sympathetic, so patient, so courteous, so generous! Yet it must be owned that they are, some of them, a little apt to leave out of sight the varieties of the human constitution, to take all human stomachs as framed on one fixed primordial pattern; above all are they, as old Lessius complained, too likely to "bring men into a labyrinth of care in the observation, and unto perfect slavery in the endeavoring to perform what they do in this matter enjoin." Sometimes I think they do but flatter the weakness of humanity, and when they meet salute each other as the old augurs used. There are folk who will not so much as take a pill at their own venture, and never fulfill an invitation to dinner without a visit to the doctor next morning. He can not afford to drive such inquisitive fools from his door; and so it may be that the healing hand, like the dyer's, becomes subdued to what it works in. The answer given by his physician to Falstaff, on his page's authority, is one it were hardly wise to risk to-day.

I have tried to show that our old forefathers were not so careless of their peptics as has been thought. Yet there was a later time when they were sadly reckless in such matters, and possibly the chronic dyspepsia from which our race seems to suffer to-day may be the heritage of that recklessness. "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." Certainly our stomachs are more bounded than was Wolsey's. To read the domestic annals of the close of the last and the early years of this century brings back the Homeric tales of the strength and prowess of the heroes who warred on the plains of Troy. No man of these degenerate days could do the work our fathers did, who "gloried and drank deep" like those lusty Jamschyds. They had, to be sure, some few points in their favor that we lack. They did not need—at least they did not use—those intermittent aids to the agreeableness of life that we seem to find so necessary. There were no brandies-and-soclas, no sherries-and-bitters, no five-o'clock teas; they were content with one solid meal in the day, and they did not put that off till it was growing time to begin to think about bed. And, I suspect, the most important point of all, they took life less hastily—not less seriously, but less hastily. Their brains were not always at high pressure; they did not