hose dinner-parties
is, the senseless custom of cheese, and the dessert afterwards. I
have a rational antipathy to the former; and for fruit, and those
other vain vegetable substitutes for meat (meat, the only legitimate
aliment for human creatures since the Flood, as I take it to be
deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and
his descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I
remember a pretty apologue, which Mandeville tells, very much to this
purpose, in his Fable of the Bees:--He brings in a Lion arguing with
a Merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with this king of beasts
upon his violent methods of feeding. The Lion thus retorts:--"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 after the
living; 'tis only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport.
Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vegetables.--(Under
favor of the Lion, if he meant to assert this universally of mankind,
it is not true. However, what he says presently is very
sensible.)--Your violent fondness to change, and greater eagerness
after novelties, have prompted you to the destruction of animals
without justice or necessity. The Lion has a ferment within him, that
consumes the toughest skin and hardest bones, as well as the flesh of
all animals without exception. Your squeamish stomach, in which the
digestive heat is weak and inconsiderable, won't so much as admit of
the most tender parts of them, unless above half the concoction has
been performed 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."--Allowing for the Lion not having a prophetic instinct
to take in every lusus naturae 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.