The art of living long : a new and improved English version of the treatise by the celebrated Venetian centenarian, Louis Cornaro, with essays / by Joseph Addison, Lord Bacon, and Sir William Temple.

  • Cornaro, Luigi, 1475-1566.
Date:
[1903]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The art of living long : a new and improved English version of the treatise by the celebrated Venetian centenarian, Louis Cornaro, with essays / by Joseph Addison, Lord Bacon, and Sir William Temple. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    prevented him. What would that philosopher ha\ e said, had he been present at the gluttony of a modern meal? Would not he have thought the master of a family mad, and have begged his servants to tie down his hands, had he seen him devour fowl, fish, and flesh; swallow oil and vinegar, wines and spices; throw down salads of twenty different herbs, sauces of a hundred ingredients, confections and fruits of numberless sweets and flavors ? What unnatural motions and counter-ferments must such a medley of intemperance produce in the body! For my part, when I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers, lying in ambuscade among the dishes. Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal, but man, keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon everything that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or a mushroom, can escape him. It is impossible to lay down any determinate rule for temperance; because what is luxury in one may be temperance in another. But there are few that have lived any time in the world, who are not judges of their own constitutions, so far as to know what kinds and what proportions of food do best agree with them. W ere I to consider my readers as my patients, and to prescribe such a kind of temperance as is accommodated to all per- ils]