"And deem'st thou us affianced girls, "But hold, my mates, your deck swift clear, Scarce died the words when quickly now GOOD LIVING THE CAUSE OF BAD WRITING. "We say it is a fleshly stile, when there is much periphrases, and circuit of words; and when with more than enough it grows fat and corpulent." Ben Jonson's Discoveries. In a former paper, entitled "Evils of Measurement in Literature," while I discovered the strongest ground for anticipating a speedy renovation from its present alleged degeneracy, I proved, to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced persons, that the decay, more especially in the quality of our periodical works, arose from the injudicious mode of paying for the commodity by external admeasurement rather than by intrinsic value. My limits would not then allow me to follow up and expose the disastrous consequences of this system, which, reacting upon itself, tends to accelerate, in a frightful ratio, the depravity of taste that our critics so pathetically deplore. By writing long articles, and running into diffuseness, authors have become rich, while the good living consequent upon sudden wealth has still farther deteriorated the quality of their writings, pecuniary abundance invariably producing intellectual penury. That the reader may yield a perfect assent to the truth of this proposition, he must bear in mind that the stomach hath ever been held the seat of some of our noblest faculties and affections. Persius calls it the dispenser of genius; the Hebrews considered it the head quarters of intellect; Saint Paul cautions the Philippians against making it their deity; we ourselves, in common parlance, hold it to be the seat of pride and courage; the Hindoos and other nations reverence it as the seat of thought, whence, in all probability, beasts with two stomachs came originally to be called ruminating animals par excellence. I believe I have expressed this opinion elsewhere, mais n'importe; it is • Iridescent. On a calm day in the Mediterranean, the rays of the sun deeply refracted in the dark blue waves, give them all the appearance of the changing and iridescent hues of mother of pearl. † ΑΛΛΑ! ΑΛΛΑ! οἱ ἄπιστοι κράζοντες προσκυνοῦνε.—Fauriel. too plausible and pertinent to be suppressed upon an uncertainty, and if I am repeating myself, I may at least plead the excuse of the old French wag, who was sometimes guilty of the same misdemeanour—“ Il faut bien que vous me permettiez de redire de temps en temps mes petits contes; sans cela je les oublierais." Where else than to the stomach should we look for the primary cause of that irritability which, in all ages, has been the distinguishing characteristic of authors; as well as for that morbid state of the intellectual faculties by which they are so often afflicted, and of which the evidence is sometimes so lamentably seen in the inferiority of their writings? Authors are no longer Grub-street garreteers, invigorating their minds by Spartan temperance, and their bodies by inhaling the pure and classical air of an Attic lodging. The mens sana in corpore sano," may now be prayed for in vain. Payment by the sheet of nine feet four has tempted them to scribble by the furlong; they have acquired riches, money has made them luxurious, luxury has deranged their intestine economy, the sympathising soul "embodies and embrutes," and thus do I come round to the title of my paper, and most logically and incontestably prove that good living is the cause of bad writing. A ready clue will be afforded us to the superiority of the ancient writers over the moderns, if we recollect that necessity is the mother of invention, and that invention has always been deemed the test, the experimentum crucis, the sine qua non of a great poet. What says Shakspeare, who, in confirmation of his own dictum, never wrote a line after he retired to Stratford and fattened upon aldermanic fare: "Fat paunches make lean pates, and grosser bits In a medical work now before me, containing some excellent maxims for men of letters, the author observes that the most successful writers have been starved into excellence and celebrity. Homer begged his bread; Cicero is described by Plutarch as being at one time of his life extremely lean and slender, and having such a weakness in his stomach, that he could eat but little; Tasso was often obliged to borrow half-acrown for a week's subsistence; Cervantes wrote his immortal work in prison; the author of "Gil Blas" lived in great poverty; Milton sold his "Paradise Lost" for ten pounds; Otway-but there is no end to the list. Read the Calamities of Authors, and you will find abundant proof in almost every page that there is no Muse or magic, no Pegasus or Parnassus, no Helicon or Hippocrene, like hunger. "It is well ascertained," says the medical writer before me, "that a spare diet tends very much to augment delicacy of feeling, liveliness of imagination, quickness of apprehension, and acuteness of judgment. The majority of our most esteemed works have been composed by men whose limited circumstances compelled them to adopt very frugal repasts; and we have much reason to suppose that their scanty fare contributed in no small degree to the excellence of their productions.' So convinced is our worthy physician of the fact, that he earnestly recommends a dose of medicine to authors before they engage in any particular study or composition; and is obliging enough to give recipes pro Sure Method of Improving Health, p. 359. portioned to the intensity of the application required. We now see the reason why the ancients made Apollo the god of medicine as well as of poetry; so true is it that there is a hidden wisdom in the most trivial detail of their mythology, if we could but unveil it. Is it not notorious to the most superficial pathologist, either from personal experience or pure observation, that gluttony stupifies the reasoning faculties, and that drunkenness destroys them altogether? and how could this result occur unless the stomach were the seat of the intellect, the great sensorium of the human frame? That the fumes of these immane potations, alembicised in the intestines, ascend into the head, and thus disorder the ratiocinative powers, is a mere medical conceit, a fond imagining of the theorists, unsupported by proof, and even unwarranted by analogy. Let our literati, then, cultivate the griping of a hungry belly as an infallible test of inspiration, and of the presence of the mens divinior, prompting all sorts of nimble, fiery, delectable, and spiritual fancies; while the Philodeipnos, who indulges in poluphagia and poluposia, (I wish to avoid the vulgar terms of gluttony and inebriety,) will never be classical in his compositions; his mind will become empty as his body fills, and he will produce heavy, somnolent, dull, leaden writings, manifestly engendered "crassâ Minerva," under the influence of a fat Minerva. Even air, light and insubstantial as such a food may appear, except to a cameleon, may be of too pinguid a quality; and the ancient Boeotians were thought to be stupified by the undue fatness of the element they breathed" Bootum in crasso juraris aëre natum." So far, however, from wishing to confine men of letters to a diet of air, however unctuous and satisfactory, the physician to whom I have referred is willing to allow them over and above, during the course of the twenty-four hours, twelve ounces of solid, and twenty ounces of liquid food, after which it will behove them to make a change in their intestine punctuation, and to take care that their colon comes to a full stop. A single mouthful beyond this limitation, even of Cotelette à l'Epigramme, will infallibly injure the point of their writings, and stultify them with ponderous and phlegmatic dulness. The writer in question cautions authors not to be "sleepless themselves to make their readers sleep," but to slumber for at least eight hours at a stretch, as the surest method of avoiding somnolency in their productions-a piece of advice which most patients, whether literary or not, would be very happy to follow. Example, which is infinitely better than precept, will abundantly justify the wisdom of this starving system. Our greatest writers have been little, attenuated men, stomachless, meagre, lean, and lath-like; beings who have half-spiritualised themselves by keeping matter in due subordination to mind, corporeally testifying that the sword has worn out the scabbard, and that the predominant soul has "o'erinformed its tegument of clay." Look at the busts and portraits of Cicero, Demosthenes, Voltaire, Pope, and a hundred others, whose minds have meagred their bodies till they became almost as ethereal as the ardent spirit they enshrined,--is it not manifest that they have the true form and physiognomy of intellectual pre-eminence, that "pallor in ore sedet, macies in corpore toto?" Lord Byron never wrote so well as when he was macerating himself by rigid abstinence; and the most eminent of our living writers are all men of temperate living and a spare bodily habit. I am not covertly complimenting the Editor of "The New Monthly," still less myself, though I flatter myself that we might both be adduced as-but this might be construed into individual vanity, of which I have already recorded my very particular abhorrence! A corpulent intellectualist is a contradiction in terms, a palpable catachresis. One might as well talk of a leaden kite, a sedentary will-o-the-wisp, a pot-bellied spirit, or lazy lightning. Obesity is a deadly foe to genius; in carneous and unwieldy bodies the spirit is like a little gudgeon in a large fryingpan of fat, which is either totally absorbed, or tastes of nothing but the lard. Let no man attempt to write who has a protuberant stomach; let no man reckon upon immortality who cannot distinctly feel and reckon his own ribs; for the thinnest bow shoots the farthest, and the leanest horse generally wins the race. If I were a publisher, I should invariably fight shy of the "fair round belly with good capon lined," and immediately offer a handsome price to the Living Skeleton for his memoirs. They would have a run, and they would deserve it; for we may be assured that they would exhibit none of the faults pointed out in my motto. All bone, muscle, and nerve, they would be doubly acceptable to a public which has lately been overwhelmed with such a mass of flesh, fat, and flummery. Nothing fat ever yet enlightened the world; for even in a tallow candle the illumination springs from the thin wick. How comes it that in the upper classes of life, among men possessing" all appliances and means to boot," who ought to be specially qualified by liberal education and the full enjoyment of leisure, we find so few writers of any sort, and scarcely one of marked eminence. With all his industry, Walpole's list of royal and noble authors presents but a meagre show in point of number, and not a particularly creditable one as to talent. The "Lords of fat Evesham and of Lincoln Fen," and our other wealthy agriculturists, have never attempted to cultivate the soil of Parnassus. What can explain this apparent anomaly, but the reflection that their station in life, placing every luxurious indulgence within their reach, has tempted them to make their own stomachs the tomb of their own genius? Hecatombs of fish, flesh, and fowl have they offered up to this insatiable ventricle, stifling in their fumes the very germs of talent, and clouding or extinguishing almost every spark of intellect. Happy they who have plied their teeth so incessantly that they have found no time to put the pen in motion, for the few who have rashly essayed to combine gastronomic with literary pursuits, have only offered a more signal example that good living is invariably the cause of bad writing.-Our oldest authors are the best, and why? Not only because they were the poorest, but because they wrote in Roman Catholic times, when fasts, and lent, and spare diet were rigidly observed. Is it upon record that any work of celebrity was ever begun during the Carnival, or that any of our civic dignitaries, conversant with feasts, festivals, and aldermanic excesses, have distinguished themselves as literati? I pause for a reply. Even poor Elkanah Settle, the last of the city laureats, unable to resist the stultifying influence of gluttonous repasts, as his Inauguration Odes attest, usque ad nauseam, finally gorged himself into such a lamentable plight, that he had just wit enough left to enact a dragon at Bartholomew Fair, and to hiss, and spit fire, for the amusement of the populace. Let our gormandizing and tippling scribblers have the fate of Elkanah perpetually before their mouths; let them pray for some physician's wand, like that which whisked away the dishes from the expectant jaws of Sancho Panza, if they wish to preserve their faculties unimpaired, and to write something that the world shall "not willingly let die." In the mysterious reciprocal action of the mind upon the body, and of the body upon the mind, it is impossible to say how intimately the mere quality of our food, without reference to its quantity, may affect every thing that we write. By longing for some particular viand or fruit, a mother will, through some inscrutable process of nature, indelibly stamp it upon her unborn child; and may not men, by the kind of nutriment upon which they subsist, while teeming with some literary work, communicate a similar impress to the offspring of their brain? Diversity of diet may even plausibly explain the various characteristics of national literature. The writings of a Frenchman, habitually living upon soupe maigre, a vol-au-vent, and an omelette, graced with Chablis or champagne, will be naturally light, mercurial, playful, sparkling, and frothy; while those of an Englishman, dining upon beef and plum-pudding, made into a heavy quagmire with port and porter, will be of a more solid texture perhaps, but gross, ponderous, grave, plethoric. By indulging in sour krout, the Germans have become a nation of critics; waterzootje and red herrings are legible in every line of the Dutch literature; macaroni and vermicelli have imparted their own frivolous and insubstantial character to the writings of the Italians; while from the wild birds and wild beasts which constitute the prevalent food of the north, we may plainly deduce the singular wildness of the Scandinavian mythology and poetry. Bearing these incontrovertible facts in mind, let every author endeavour to adapt his food to the nature of his intended composition; above all, and under every circumstance, attending to that golden rule of Milton, who exemplified in his works the glorious results of his own recommendation. "Well observe The rule of not too much, by temperance taught, In what thou eat'st and drink'st, seeking from thence LONDON LYRICS. The Two Elephants. WHERE, back'd by a Castle, the Elephant's free And walk'd off to Astley's the new Piece to see: But here a live Elephant stood on the brink "Heavy wet" was, I found, his appropriate drink, 'Twixt hither and thither, a mere nunc et tunc, The Porter there's ready to carry the trunk, |