This
alone will procure them familiarity with us, and the preference they
merit in competition with corresponding articles now in use.
Our family renew with pleasure their recollections of your kind visit
to Monticello, and join me in tendering sincere assurances of the
gratification it afforded us, and of our great esteem and respectful
consideration.
Th: Jefferson.
LETTER CXLVII.--TO DOCTOR VINE UTLEY, March 21, 1819
TO DOCTOR VINE UTLEY.
Monticello, March 21, 1819.
Sir,
Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and
the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me
not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied
it, of Doctor Rush's answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like
other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as the history of my
own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little
animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the
vegetables, which constitute my principal diet. I double, however, the
Doctor's glass and a half of wine, and even treble it with a friend;
but halve its effect by drinking the weak wines only. The ardent wines I
cannot drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form. Malt liquors
and cider are my table drinks, and my breakfast, like that also of
my friend, is of tea and coffee. I have been blest with organs of
digestion, which accept and concoct, without ever murmuring, whatever
the palate chooses to consign to them, and I have not yet lost a tooth
by age.
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