Page:The Canterbury tales of Geoffrey Chaucer.djvu/131

 driven from Paradise to labour and to woe; for while Adam fasted, as I have read, he was in Paradise; and when he ate the forbidden fruit of the tree, he was straightway cast out to woe and suffering. O gluttony, well ought we to complain of thee! Oh, if a man wist how many maladies follow from gluttonous excess, sitting at his table, he would be the more temperate of his diet. Alas! short throat and delicate mouth causeth—east and west and south and north, in earth, in air, in water—that men must grunt and sweat to get dainty meat and drink for a glutton! Well canst thou treat, O Paul, of this matter. "Meat unto belly and belly unto meat; God shall destroy both," as saith Paulus.

Alas! by my fay, it is a foul thing to speak this word and the act is fouler, when a man so drinketh of the white and red that of his throat he maketh a sewer through that cursed superfluity. The apostle, full sorrowful, saith, weeping, "There walk many of which I have told you, I say it now weeping with piteous voice, of which, sith they be enemies of the cross of Christ, the end is death; belly is their god." O paunch! O belly! O vile sack! how great labour and cost is it to provide for thee! These cooks, how they stamp and strain and grind and turn substance into accident to fulfil all thy luxurious desire. Out of hard bones they knock the marrow, for they cast naught away that may go through the gullet soft and sweet. For the glutton's pleasure, his sauce shall be made of spicery, of leaf and bark and root to whet him a new appetite. But certes he that resorteth to such delights is dead while he liveth in those vices.

A lustful thing is wine, and drunkenness is full of striving and misery. O drunken man, disfigured is thy countenance, sour is thy breath, foul art thou to embrace, and the sound through