and I say again, of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the worst
is the flesh itself. As the poet says--"The world, the flesh
and the devil"--and there you have it in a sentence--the flesh
in between, catching the devil on one side and the jeers of the
world on the other. I don't care what Dr. Woods Hutchinson or any
other thin man says! I contend that history is studded with
instances of prominent persons who lost out because they got fat.
Take Cleopatra now, the lady to whom Marc Antony said: "I am dying,
Egypt, dying," and then refrained from doing so for about nineteen
more stanzas. Cleo or Pat--she was known by both names, I hear--
did fairly well as a queen, as a coquette and as a promoter of
excursions on the river--until she fleshened up. Then she
flivvered. Doctor Johnson was a fat man and he suffered from
prickly heat, and from Boswell, and from the fact that he couldn't
eat without spilling most of the gravy on his second mezzanine
landing. As a thin and spindly stripling Napoleon altered the map
of Europe and stood many nations on their heads. It was after he
had grown fat and pursy that he landed on St. Helena and spent his
last days on a barren rock, with his arms folded, posing for steel
engravings. Nero was fat, and he had a lot of hard luck in keeping
his relatives--they were almost constantly dying on him and he
finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-looking old
Roman two-handed swords, lest something really serious befall him.
Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act.
Coming down to our own day and turning to a point no farther away
than the White House at Washington--but have we not enough examples
without becoming personal? Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: "Let me
have men about me that are fat." But you bet it wasn't in the
heated period when J. Caesar said that!