Between the stomach and the highest faculty of our souls there is a very close connection, though men have vainly endeavored to disprove it. Heavy food, which calls for undue action of the stomach, paralyzes, for a time at least, all mental action, and destroys the highest power of the mind—imagination. By gentle stimulants, however, we may increase both—provided we are temperate. You see better with a spy-glass than with the naked eye, provided you do not draw it out beyond the proper focus. Again; good cheer promotes cordiality, friendship, benevolence, and charity. Only the highest paroxysm of love is capable of triumphing over the stomach. But how long does it last? And does it not, in the end, warm itself at the chemical fire of good cheer, or die for the want of it? Love does very well during the hey-days of the blood; while the stomach, with its even sway, governs until death, with a power which increases as it goes on. Every passion fades as we pass the meridian of life, or dwells only in that great faculty of the soul, reminiscence, until that even becomes palsied by the gnawing tooth of time; but the sensitiveness of the palate increases—a regular gourmandizer scarcely existing before the age of forty. Our taste becomes matured with our judgment; when reason waits upon the tender passions, they have already flown. Every other passion has a regular rise and fall, and a culmination point, the pleasures of the palate alone are fixed and immovable as the eternal stars in the firmament. The fiery youth may “sigh like furnace,” and make “ballads to his mistress’ eyebrow,” and man “may seek the bubble reputation even at the cannon’s mouth;” but the sober _justice_ is “_capon lined_;” he is the only sensible person among them, and guards against the _bowels_ of compassion, by that completeness about the region of the stomach which is generally received as _prima faciæ_ evidence of good nature. The Chinese—the oldest civilized people on earth—require that their justices should be _fat_; and the popular idiom of our own language corresponds to it; for we expect from a judge, _gravity_ of deportment, and sedate manners. Lean men seldom inspire the confidence which fat men do. “I wish he were fatter,” says Cæsar, of Cassius; for a man who feeds well, and grows fat, has given “hostage to fortune.” Corpulency, like marriage, being “a great impediment either to enterprise or mischief.”[1]