brain affected, and in a manner overclouded, melancholy." "Amongst herbs to be eaten from that indissoluble sympathy between (he says) I find gourds, cucumbers, melons, the noble and less noble parts of the body disallowed; but especially CABBAGE. It which Dennis hints at? The unnatural and causeth troublesome dreams, and sends up painful manner of his sitting must also black vapours to the brain. Galen, Loc. greatly aggravate the evil, insomuch that I Affect. lib. iii. cap. 6, of all herbs condemus have sometimes ventured to liken tailors at CABBAGE. And Isaack, lib. ii. cap. 1, animæ their boards to so many envious Junos, sitting gravitatem facit, it brings heaviness to the cross-legged to hinder the birth of their own soul." I could not omit so flattering a testifelicity. The legs transversed thus cross-mony from an author who, having no theory wise, or decussated, was among the ancients of his own to serve, has so unconsciously the posture of malediction. The Turks, who contributed to the confirmation of mine. It practise it at this day, are noted to be a is well known that this last-named vegetable melancholy people. has, from the earliest periods which we can Secondly, his diet.-To which purpose I discover, constituted almost the sole food of find a most remarkable passage in Burton, this extraordinary race of people. in his chapter entitled "Bad diet a cause of BURTON, Junior. HOSPITA ON THE IMMODERATE INDULGENCE OF THE PLEASURES OF THE PALATE. MR. REFLECTOR,-My husband and I are fond of company, and being in easy circumstances, we are seldom without a party to dinner two or three days in a week. The utmost cordiality has hitherto prevailed at our meetings; but there is a young gentleman, a near relation of my husband's, that has lately come among us, whose preposterous behaviour bids fair, if not timely checked, to disturb our tranquillity. He is too great a favourite with my husband in other respects, for me to remonstrate with him in any other than this distant way. A letter printed in your publication may catch his eye; for he is a great reader, and makes a point of seeing all the new things that come out. Indeed, he is by no means deficient in understanding. My husband says that he has a good deal of wit; but for my part I cannot say I am any judge of that, having seldom observed him open his mouth except for purposes very foreign to conversation. In short, Sir, this young gentleman's failing is, an immoderate indulgence of his palate. The first time he dined with us, he thought it necessary to extenuate the length of time he kept the dinner on the table, by declaring that he had taken a very long walk in the morning, and came in fasting; but as that excuse could not serve above once or twice at most, he has latterly dropped the mask altogether, and chosen to appear in his own proper colours without reserve or apology. You cannot imagine how unpleasant his conduct has become. His way of staring at the dishes as they are brought in, has absolutely something immodest in it: it is like the stare of an impudent man of fashion at a fine woman, when she first comes into a room. I am positively in pain for the dishes, and cannot help thinking they have consciousness, and will be put out of countenance, he treats them so like what they are not. Then again he makes no scruple of keeping a joint of meat on the table, after the cheese and fruit are brought in, till he has what he calls done with it. Now how awkward this looks, where there are ladies, you may judge, Mr. Reflector,-how it disturbs the order and comfort of a meal. And yet I always make a point of helping him first, contrary to all good manners,-before any of my female friends are helped,—that he may avoid this very error. I wish he would eat before he comes out. What makes his proceedings more particu- more reconciled to it, in some measure, from larly offensive at our house is, that my my telling her that it was the custom of the husband, though out of common politeness world, to which, however senseless, we he is obliged to set dishes of animal food must submit, so far as we could do it with before his visitors, yet himself and his whole innocence, not to give offence; and she has family, (myself included) feed entirely on shown so much strength of mind on other vegetables. We have a theory, that animal occasions, which I have no doubt is owing to food is neither wholesome nor natural to the calmness and serenity superinduced by man ; and even vegetables we refuse to eat her diet, that I am in good hopes when the until they have undergone the operation of proper season for her début arrives, she may fire, in consideration of those numberless be brought to endure the sight of a roasted little living creatures which the glass helps chicken or a dish of sweet-breads for the us to detect in every fibre of the plant or first time without fainting. Such being the root before it be dressed. On the same nature of our little household, you may guess theory we boil our water, which is our only what inroads into the economy of it,—what drink, before we suffer it to come to table. revolutions and turnings of things upside Our children are perfect little Pythagoreans: down, the example of such a feeder as it would do you good to see them in their Mr. is calculated to produce. nursery, stuffing their dried fruits, figs, I wonder, at a time like the 'present, when raisins, and milk, which is the only approach to animal food which is allowed. They have no notion how the substance of a creature that ever had life can become food for another creature. A beef-steak is an absurdity to them; a mutton-chop, a solecism in terms; a cutlet, a word absolutely without any meaning; a butcher is nonsense, except so far as it is taken for a man who delights in blood, or a hero. In this happy state of innocence we have kept their minds, not allowing them to go into the kitchen, or to hear of any preparations for the dressing of animal food, or even to know that such things are practised. But as a state of ignorance is incompatible with a certain age, and as my eldest girl, who is ten years old next Midsummer, must shortly be introduced into the world and sit at table with us, where she will see some things which will shock all her received notions, I have been endeavouring by little and little to break her mind, and prepare it for the disagreeable impressions which must be forced upon it. The first hint I gave her upon the subject, I could see her recoil from it with the same horror with which we listen to a tale of Anthropophagism; but she has gradually grown the scarcity of every kind of food is so painfully acknowledged, that shame has no effect upon him. Can he have read Mr. Malthus's Thoughts on the Ratio of Food to Population? Can he think it reasonable that one man should consume the sustenance of many? The young gentleman has an agreeable air and person, such as are not unlikely to recommend him on the score of matrimony. But his fortune is not over large; and what prudent young woman would think of embarking hers with a man who would bring three or four mouths (or what is equivalent to them) into a family? She might as reasonably choose a widower in the same circumstances, with three or four children. I cannot think who he takes after. His father and mother, by all accounts, were very moderate eaters; only I have heard that the latter swallowed her victuals very fast, and the former had a tedious custom of sitting long at his meals. Perhaps he takes after both. I wish you would turn this in your thoughts, Mr. Reflector, and give us your ideas on the subject of excessive eating, and, particularly, of animal food. HOSPITA EDAX ON APPETITE. " MR. REFLECTOR, I am going to lay before | period when it was thought proper, on you a case of the most iniquitous persecution account of my advanced age, that I should that ever poor devii suffered. mix with other boys more unreservedly than I had hitherto done. I was accordingly sent to boarding-school. You must know, then, that I have been visited with a calamity ever since my birth. How shall I mention it without offending delicacy? Yet out it must. My sufferings, then, have all arisen from a most inordinate appetite Not for wealth, not for vast possessions, then might I have hoped to find a cure in some of those precepts of philosophers or poets, those verba et voces which Horace speaks of : "quibus hunc lenire dolorem Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem;" not for glory, not for fame, not for applause, -for against this disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope has chosen to render it, "rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied, Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride;" nor yet for pleasure, properly so called: the strict and virtuous lessons which I received in early life from the best of parents, a pious clergyman of the Church of England, now no more,-I trust have rendered me sufficiently secure on that side: No, Sir, for none of these things; but an appetite, in its coarsest and least metaphorical sense, an appetite for food. Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be disguised. The prying republic of which a great school consists soon found me out there was no shifting the blame any longer upon other people's shoulders,-no good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities of which I stood accused in the article of bread and butter, besides the crying sin of stolen ends of puddings, and cold pies strangely missing. The truth was but too manifest in my looks, -in the evident signs of inanition which I exhibited after the fullest meals, in spite of the double allowance which my master was privately instructed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in boys. Once detected, I was the constant butt of their arrows,—the mark against which every puny leveller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very Graduses and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny pedants. Ventri natus-Ventri deditus,— Vesana gula,-Escarum gurges,—Dapibus indulgens,-Non dans fræna gulæ,-Sectans lautæ fercula mensæ, resounded wheresoever I passed. I led a weary life, suffering the The exorbitancies of my arrow-root and penalties of guilt for that which was no pappish days I cannot go back far enough to crime, but only following the blameless remember; only I have been told that my dictates of nature. The remembrance of mother's constitution not admitting of my those childish reproaches haunts me yet being nursed at home, the woman who had oftentimes in my dreams. My school-days the care of me for that purpose used to make come again, and the horror I used to feel, most extravagant demands for my pretended when, in some silent corner, retired from the excesses in that kind; which my parents, notice of my unfeeling playfellows, I have rather than believe anything unpleasant of sat to mumble the solitary slice of gingerme, chose to impute to the known covetous-bread allotted me by the bounty of conness and mercenary disposition of that sort siderate friends, and have ached at heart of people. This blindness continued on their because I could not spare a portion of it, as part after I was sent for home, up to the I saw other boys do, to some favourite boy; for if I know my own heart, I was never except for its long sitting. Those vivacious, selfish, never possessed a luxury which I long-continued meals of the latter Romans, did not hasten to communicate to others; but my food, alas! was none; it was an indispensable necessary; I could as soon have spared the blood in my veins, as have parted that with my companions. indeed, I justly envy; but the kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up with, I could be content with. Dentatus I have been called, among other unsavoury jests. Doublemeal is another name which my acquaintance have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy which I put in practice for some time without being found Well, no one stage of suffering lasts for ever: we should grow reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did. The miseries of my school-days had their end; I was once out; which was going the round of my more restored to the paternal dwelling. The affectionate solicitude of my parents was directed to the good-natured purpose of concealing, even from myself, the infirmity which haunted me. I was continually told that I was growing, and the appetite I displayed was humanely represented as being nothing more than a symptom and an effect of that. I used even to be complimented upon it. But this temporary fiction could not endure above a year or two. I ceased to grow, but, alas! I did not cease my demands for alimentary sustenance. Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased to exist the fond concealment-the indulgent blindness-the delicate overlooking the compassionate fiction. I and my infirmity are left exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance; that which appetite demands is set down to the account of gluttony,-a sin which my whole soul abhors-nay, which Nature herself has put it out of my power to commit. I am constitutionally disenabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of excess who never can get enough? Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of fragments, and the supernaturallyreplenished cup of old Baucis: and be thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved them from the like reproaches. I do not see that any of them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is supplied. Alas! I am doomed to stop short of that continence. friends, beginning with the most primitive "Savage I am; but no creature can be called cruel but what either by malice or insensibility extinguishes his natural pity. The Lion was born without compassion; we follow the instinct of our nature; the gods have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other animals, and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt What am I to do? I am by disposition after the living; 'tis only man, mischievous inclined to conviviality and the social meal. man, that can make death a sport. Nature I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I taught your stomach to crave nothing but should despise the board of Heliogabalus, vegetables.-(Under favour of the Lion, if he meant to assert this universally of mankind, Rather let me say, that to the satisfaction it is not true. However, what he says of that talent which was given me, I have presently is very sensible.)-Your violent been content to sacrifice no common expectfondness to change, and greater eagerness ations; for such I had from an old lady, a after novelties, have prompted you to the near relation of our family in whose good destruction of animals without justice or graces I had the fortune to stand, till one necessity. The Lion has a ferment within fatal evening. You have seen, Mr. him, that consumes the toughest skin and Reflector, if you have ever passed your time hardest bones, as well as the flesh of all much in country towns, the kind of suppers animals, without exception. Your squeamish which elderly ladies in those places have stomach, in which the digestive heat is weak lying in petto in an adjoining parlour, next and inconsiderable, won't so much as admit to that where they are entertaining their of the most tender parts of them, unless periodically-invited coevals with cards and above half the concoction has been performed muffins. The cloth is usually spread some by artificial fire beforehand; and yet what animal have you spared, to satisfy the caprices of a languid appetite? Languid, I say; for what is man's hunger if compared with the Lion's? Yours, when it is at the worst, makes you faint; mine makes me mad: oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay the violence of it, but in vain; nothing but large quantities of flesh can any ways appease it."-Alowing for the Lion not having a prophetic instinct to take in every lusus naturæ that was possible of the human appetite, he was, generally speaking, in the right; and the Merchant was so impressed with his argument that, we are told, he replied not, but fainted away. O, Mr. Reflector, that I were not obliged to add, that the creature who thus argues was but a type of me! Miserable man! I am that Lion! "Oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay that violence, but in vain; nothing but half-hour before the final rubber is decided, whence they adjourn to sup upon what may emphatically be called nothing;—a sliver of ham, purposely contrived to be transparent to show the china-dish through it, neighbouring a slip of invisible brawn, which abuts upon something they call a tartlet, as that is bravely supported by an atom of marmalade, flanked in its turn by a grain of potted beef, with a power of such dishlings, minims of hospitality, spread in defiance of human nature, or rather with an utter ignorance of what it demands. Being engaged at one of these card-parties, I was obliged to go a little before supper time (as they facetiously called the point of time in which they are taking these shadowy refections), and the old lady, with a sort of fear shining through the smile of courteous hospitality that beamed in her countenance, begged me to step into the next room and take something before I went out in the cold,—a Those tales which are renewed as often as proposal which lay not in my nature to deny. the editors of papers want to fill up a space Indignant at the airy prospect I saw before in their unfeeling columns, of great eaters, me, I set to, and in a trice despatched the people that devour whole geese and legs of whole meal intended for eleven persons,mutton for wagers, are sometimes attempted fish, flesh, fowl, pastry,-to the sprigs of to be drawn to a parallel with my case. garnishing parsley, and the last fearful This wilful confounding of motives and custard that quaked upon the board. I need circumstances, which make all the difference not describe the consternation, when in due of moral or immoral in actions, just suits the time the dowagers adjourned from their sort of talent which some of my acquaintance cards. Where was the supper?-and the pride themselves upon. Wagers!-I thank servants' answer, Mr. Heaven, I was never mercenary, nor could-That freak, however, jested me out of a consent to prostitute a gift (though but a good three hundred pounds a year, which I left-handed one) of nature, to the enlarging afterwards was informed for a certainty the of my worldly substance; prudent as the necessities, which that fatal gift have involved me in, might have made such a prostitution to appear in the eyes of an indelicate world. had eat it all. old lady meant to leave me. I mention it not in illustration of the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; for any unlucky wag of a schoolboy, with a tolerable appetite, |