I am constitutionally disenabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of excess who never can get enough?
Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of fragments, and the supernaturally replenished cup of old Baucis: and be thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved them from the like reproaches.

I do not see that any of them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is supplied.

Alas! I am doomed to stop short of that continence.
What am I to do?
I am by disposition inclined to conviviality and the social meal.

I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I should despise the board of Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting.

Those vivacious, long-continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed, I justly envy; but the kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up with, I could be content with.