Pig—­let me speak his praise—­is no less provocative of the appetite, than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate.  The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.

Unlike to mankind’s mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is—­good throughout.  No part of him is better or worse than another.  He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around.  He is the least envious of banquets.  He is all neighbours’ fare.

I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend.  I protest I take as great an interest in my friend’s pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own.  “Presents,” I often say, “endear Absents.”  Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chicken (those “tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them.  I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend.  But a stop must be put somewhere.  One would not, like Lear, “give every thing.”  I make my stand upon pig.  Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly, (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate—­It argues an insensibility.

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school.  My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweet-meat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven.  In my way to school (it was over London bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was a counterfeit).  I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy-like, I made him a present of—­the whole cake!  I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction; but before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger, that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I—­I myself, and not another—­would eat her nice cake—­and what should I say to her the next time I saw her—­how naughty I was to part with her pretty present—­and the odour of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last—­and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor.