He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and
we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen.--Yet
we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as
much in imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross
and stupify his other faculties, but 'ascends me into the brain,
clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes
it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes'. His imagination
keeps up the ball after his senses have done with it. He seems to
have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good
cheer, of his ease, of his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated
descriptions which he gives of them, than in fact. He never fails to
enrich his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking, but we
never see him at table. He carries his own larder about with him,
and he is himself 'a tun of man'. His pulling out the bottle in the
field of battle is a joke to show his contempt for glory accompanied
with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in
the most trying circumstances. Again, such is his deliberate
exaggeration of his own vices, that it does not seem quite certain
whether the account of his hostess's bill, found in his pocket, with
such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with only one
halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to
humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious
caricature of himself.
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