dmired their silent grace, and the more because I have
observed their applications to the meat and drink following to be
less passionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor
wine-bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopt hay,
with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They neither
grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen in his bib and
tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice.

I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the
kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to
be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows
it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in
higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to
like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes
for food. C---- holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses
apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of
my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those
innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with
me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle
thoughts. I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments,
as to come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some
savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter
ill melted--that commonest of kitchen failures--puts me beside my
tenour.--The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate animal
noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite proper to
be preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have done better
to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing plight be
contemplated with less perturbation? I quarrel with no man's tastes,
nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their
way, jollity and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable,
have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure,
before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his
devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some
great fish--his Dagon--with a special consecration of no ark but the
fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the
banquets of angels and children; to the roots and severer repasts
of the Chartreuse; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged,
refection of the poor and humble man: but at the heaped-up boards of
t