But knowledge is as food, and needs no less Her temperance over appetite, to know In measure what the mind may well contain, Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.126^30.

The capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support.

-Smollett,Tobias George
  Of London. Letter from Matthew Bramble, 29 May, Humphrey Clinker, vol.1.

First, sturdy March with brows full sternly bent, And arme'  d strongly, rode upon a ram, The same which over Hellespontus swam: Yet in his hand a spade he also hent, And in a bag all sorts of seeds ysame, Which on the earth he strowe'  d as he went, And filled her womb with fruitful hope of nourishment.

-Spenser, Edmund
  The Faerie Queen,'Mutability', canto 7, stanza 32. hent = grasped; ysame = together.

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand.

-Sterne, Laurence
^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.2, ch.19.