My form of life is the same in sickness as in health; the same bed, the same hours, the same meat, and even the same drink, serve me in both conditions alike; I add nothing to them but the moderation of more or less, according to my strength and appetite.  My health is to maintain my wonted state without disturbance.  I see that sickness puts me off it on one side, and if I will be ruled by the physicians, they will put me off on the other; so that by fortune and by art I am out of my way.  I believe nothing more certainly than this, that I cannot be hurt by the use of things to which I have been so long accustomed.  ’Tis for custom to give a form to a man’s life, such as it pleases him; she is all in all in that:  ’tis the potion of Circe, that varies our nature as she best pleases.  How many nations, and but three steps from us, think the fear of the night-dew, that so manifestly is hurtful to us, a ridiculous fancy; and our own watermen and peasants laugh at it.  You make a German sick if you lay him upon a mattress, as you do an Italian if you lay him on a feather-bed, and a Frenchman, if without curtains or fire.  A Spanish stomach cannot hold out to eat as we can, nor ours to drink like the Swiss.  A German made me very merry at Augsburg, by finding fault with our hearths, by the same arguments which we commonly make use of in decrying their stoves:  for, to say the truth, the smothered heat, and then the smell of that heated matter of which the fire is composed, very much offend such as are not used to them; not me; and, indeed, the heat being always equal, constant, and universal, without flame, without smoke, and without the wind that comes down our chimneys, they may many ways sustain comparison with ours.  Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture? for they say that anciently fires were not made in the houses, but on the outside, and at the foot of them, whence the heat was conveyed to the whole fabric by pipes contrived in the wall, which were drawn twining about the rooms that were to be warmed:  which I have seen plainly described somewhere in Seneca.  This German hearing me commend the conveniences and beauties of his city, which truly deserves it, began to compassionate me that I had to leave it; and the first inconvenience he alleged to me was, the heaviness of head that the chimneys elsewhere would bring upon me.  He had heard some one make this complaint, and fixed it upon us, being by custom deprived of the means of perceiving it at home.  All heat that comes from the fire weakens and dulls me.  Evenus said that fire was the best condiment of life:  I rather choose any other way of making myself warm.