the belly and such other conveyances of the body as let in pleasure
and not pain; and are of opinion, that all the brave and ingenious
inventions that ever have been were contrived at first for the
pleasure of the belly, or the good hope of compassing such
pleasure,--as the sage Metrodorus informs us. By which, my good
friend, it is very plain, they found their pleasure in a poor,
rotten, and unsure thing, and one that is equally perforated for
pains, by the very passages they receive their pleasures by; or
rather indeed, that admits pleasure but by a few, but pain by all
its parts. For the whole of pleasure is in a manner in the joints,
nerves, feet, and hands; and these are oft the seats of very
grievous and lamentable distempers, as gouts, corroding rheums,
gangrenes, and putrid ulcers. And if you apply to yourself the
exquisitest of perfumes or gusts, you will find but some one small
part of your body is finely and delicately touched, while the rest
are many times filled with anguish and complaints. Besides, there
is no part of us proof against fire, sword, teeth, or scourges, or
insensible of dolors and aches; yea, heats, colds, and fevers sink
into all our parts alike. But pleasures, like gales of soft wind,
move simpering, one towards one extreme of the body and another
towards another, and then go off in a vapor. Nor are they of any
long durance, but, as so many glancing meteors, they are no sooner
kindled in the body than they are quenched by it. As to pain,
Aeschylus's Philoctetes affords us a sufficient testimony:--

The cruel viper ne'er will quit my foot;
Her dire envenomed teeth have there ta'en root.

For pain will not troll off as pleasure doth, nor imitate it in its
pleasing and tickling touches. But as the clover twists its