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This learned physician gave them to understand, that though this was reckoned a luxurious fish in the zenith of the Roman taste, it was by no means comparable, in point of expense, to some preparations in vogue about the time of that absurd voluptuary Heliogabalus, who ordered the brains of six hundred ostriches to be compounded in one illness.
Bad governors of provinces, Verres, Fonteius, Gabinius, were impeached and punished. Lucullus, autocrat and voluptuary as he was, governed his province well. So did Cicero, if we may take his own word for it. We may, at all events, take his own word for this, that he was anxious to be thought to have ruled with purity and justice, which proves that purity and justice were not quite out of fashion.
In such an encampment as this, after a plentiful supper of half-cooked peas and Indian corn the inland travelling fare of the Montreal department and a day's hard walking, one enjoys a repose to which the voluptuary reclining on his bed of down is a perfect stranger. We reached our destination on the following day about noon, where we found but little to recompense us for our journey.
That he should have, in his old age, suddenly abandoned his career of vigorous enjoyment is, I confess, rather surprising. The Royal voluptuary generally remains young to the last. No one ever tires of pleasure. It is the pursuit of pleasure, the trouble to grasp it, that makes us old. Only the soldiers who enter Capua with wounded feet leave it demoralised.
He was a base-minded voluptuary, who, aided by rich gifts of mind and wide knowledge, had shunned no means of ingratiating himself with Antony, the most lavish of patrons. The repulse which this man, accustomed to success, had received from Barine had been hard to forget, yet he did not resign the hope of winning her. Never had she seemed more desirable than in her touching weakness.
Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating as an illusion.
Nor is the next author who presents himself any better in this respect, the voluptuary and poetaster C. SILIUS ITALICUS. This laborious compiler and tasteless versifier was born 25 A.D., or according to some 24 A.D., and died by his own act seventy-six years later.
For the most part, they remind me of the remark which the Commodore made upon a certain painting of Jupiter and lo which hangs in the writing-room of the Contrary Club. "Sir," said that gently piercing critic, "that picture is equally unsatisfactory to the artist, to the moralist, and to the voluptuary."
The poor slave, on his hard, pine plank, but scantily covered with his thin blanket, sleeps more soundly than the feverish voluptuary who reclines upon his feather bed and downy pillow. Food, to the indolent lounger, is poison, not sustenance.
On the death of Runjeet Singh, the Lion of Lahore, chief of the Sikhs and ruler of the Punjaub, in 1839, the throne was seized by his reputed son, Sher Singh. He was a good-natured voluptuary, and utterly unable to manage the warlike troops raised by his father.
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