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Updated: May 21, 2025
As I love my belly, quoth Panurge, I by no means understand this riddle. Methinks this should rather be one of the four windy weeks; for while we fast we are only puffed up with wind. Pray now, good father hermit, have not you here some other pastime besides fasting? Methinks it is somewhat of the leanest; we might well enough be without so many palace holidays and those fasting times of yours.
There she sits, Milton's "Paradise Lost" in her witch-like fingers, herself lean enough for the leanest of witches, and seeming to have either shrunk away from the faded black silk dress in which she is clad, or passed through half a century of starvation merely to bolster up her dignity.
Blount, who wrote in 1634, affirms that these sponge-divers "are from infancy bred up on dry biscuites and other extenuatinge dyet, to make them extreme lean; then takinge a spunge wet in oyle, they hold it, part in their mouths, and part without, soe they go under water, where at first they can not stay long, but after practice, the leanest stay an hour and a halfe, even till the oyle of the spunge be corrupted.... Thus they gather spunges from more than an hundred fathom deep," &c.
I wouldn't sell it for love or money, for when your father gets his railroad running, I'm going to cash in on ten of the leanest and hardest and lonesomest years that any man ever put in." How hard it would be for him to give it all up; to acknowledge defeat, to feel those ten wasted years behind him, empty, unproductive; full of shattered hopes and dreams changed to nightmares!
The farmer used this plough for many years, and the smallest foal or the leanest little horse could draw it through the ground, to the amazement of every one who beheld it, without turning a single hair. This plough made a rich man of the farmer, for it cost him no horse-flesh, and he led a cheerful and contented life by means of it.
I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours. I have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both unusually stout people?
Of his figure, which was well enough formed, though somewhat of the leanest, he entertained the highest admiration; and with his legs, which, in knee-breeches, were perfect curiosities of littleness, he was enraptured to a degree amounting to enthusiasm. He also had some majestic, shadowy ideas, which had never been quite fathomed by his intimate friends, concerning the power of his eye.
This was, of course, one of the leanest of the lean years that the fishermen encountered; but with all the encouragement in the way of bounties and protected markets that Congress could give them, they never were able to earn in a life, as much as a successful promoter of trusts nowadays will make in half an hour.
One could see them any day sauntering along with their arms over their companions' shoulders, splendidly indifferent to the ways of the people about them. They hated the "Nawth" and cursed the Yankees, and honestly believed that the leanest of them was a match for any half a dozen of the bulkiest of Northerners.
Then, Mathias said, the law of Moses is not abrogated, thou leanest upon it when it suiteth thy purpose to lean, and pushest it aside when it pleases thee to reprove us as laggards in tradition and among the beginnings of things.
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