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Updated: June 3, 2025
When Tillotson, or Berkeley, or Bishop Butler, or William Law, as well as Chubb and Tindal, spoke of happiness as the highest end, they meant something very different from 'the sleek and sordid epicurism, in which religion and a good conscience have their place among the means by which life is to be made more comfortable. William Law's definition of happiness as 'the satisfaction of all means, capacities, and necessities, the order and harmony of his being; in other words, the right state of a man, has not much in common with the motives of expedience urged by Bentham and Paley, utilitarian systems, truly spoken of as 'of the earth, earthy. But, in any case, even the highest conception of the expedient rests on a lower plane of principle than the humblest aspiration after the right.
As he sat and watched his amiable and clever companion going through his excellent repast with the delicate deliberation of hereditary epicurism, the folly of so charming a fellow traveling off to expose his agreeable young life for the sake of M. Stanislas and Mademoiselle Noemie struck him with intolerable force.
Nor can I doubt the accuracy of the historian, who assures us that a Roman emperor, one of the most moderate of those imperial gluttons, took for his breakfast, 500 figs, 100 peaches, 10 melons, 100 beccaficoes, and 400 oysters. Epicurism was scarcely more prevalent during the decline of the Roman empire than it is at this day amongst some of the wealthy and noble youths of Britain.
With an infinitely powerful and passionate imagination, and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental analysis; only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle Ages; unsettled in their philosophy; inclined by wholesale classical reading to a sort of negative atheism, a fatalistic and half-melancholy mixture of epicurism and stoicism; yet keenly alive, from study of the Bible and of religious controversies, to all questions of right and wrong; thus highly wrought and deeply perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets were impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by the horrible deeds of one whom we are accustomed to venerate as our guide, whom we cannot but love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless.
Such of our readers as are not addicted to epicurism may have been somewhat puzzled at the display of "Fine Fresh Laver" in the Italian warehouses and provision shops of the metropolis.
She was nice only from natural delicacy, but he had been brought up in a school of luxury and epicurism. The Prices were just setting off for church the next day when Mr. Crawford appeared again. He came, not to stop, but to join them; he was asked to go with them to the Garrison chapel, which was exactly what he had intended, and they all walked thither together.
As for me, I had not known her four days before I discovered that she could not be excessively enamoured of any thing but an oyster pete and Lord Byron's Corsair. Her mind was the most marvellous melange of sentiment and its opposite. In her amours she was Lucretia herself; in her epicurism, Apicius would have yielded to her. She was pleased with sighs, but she adored suppers.
If my heart ached with an indefinite longing, if it felt that the airy epicurism of the Pacha was but a sad cynicism, masquerading in smiles, if I dreaded to ask whether the wisest were not the saddest, if the rising moon, and the plunging sea, and the silence of midnight, were mournful, if I envied Daisy Clover her sweet sleep and vigorous waking, why, no one need ever know it, nor suspect that the brilliant Minerva Tattle is a failure.
"Amen to your creed," said I: "edibilatory Epicurism holds the key to all morality: for do we not see now how sinful it is to yield to an obscene and exaggerated intemperance? would it not be to the last degree ungrateful to the great source of our enjoyment, to overload it with a weight which would oppress it with languor, or harass it with pain; and finally to drench away the effects of our impiety with some nauseous potation which revolts it, tortures it, convulses, irritates, enfeebles it, through every particle of its system?
I rose early, walked before breakfast, pour ma sante, and came back with a most satisfactory head-ache, pour mes peines. I read for just three hours, walked for two more, thought over Abernethy, dyspepsia, and blue pills, till dinner; and absolutely forgot Lord Dawton, ambition, Guloseton, epicurism aye, all but of course, reader, you know whom I am about to except the ladye of my love.
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