red us. Gentle readers, let us
not be impatient. Progress has been of late so rapid, that many of you,
it is to be hoped, will yet have an opportunity of hailing the return of
those two noble institutions, _pro majore gloria Dei_, for which they
always existed, as long as chill and misty skepticism did not extinguish
their glowing poetry. Ah! happy times! poetic age! when there existed
not only "words that burn," but also laws that burned!

In the mean time, it may not be inappropriate to commence the
consideration of a topic somewhat farther removed from us, but which,
according to our humble opinion, ought not to remain wholly beyond the
limits of a candid, liberal, and unprejudiced examination,--we mean the
important question, Whether the choicest of all substances, the most
delicate of all muscular texture, that substance of which kings,
philosophers, policemen, and supporters of crinoline are fashioned
by the plastic hand of Nature, ought forever to be excluded from the
reproductive process of wasted energy and proportionably consumed
nervous and cerebral fibre. Reader, do not shrink; grant us a patient
ear. You do not know how rapidly you may change your own opinion and
feelings. Do you not remember with what awe we first read in the
"Almanach des Gourmands," that a certain _sauce piquante_ was so fine
that with it a man would eat his own mother? This was only twenty years
ago; yet all of us, now, are helping a high-bred gentleman, trading, on
a gigantic scale, in the bones of his great ancestor. What sublimity of
peddling!

To those who say, It is unnatural to eat our friends, we would answer,
that it is the office of civilization to remove us farther and farther
from Nature. Analyze the present magnitude called Lady, and you can
arithmetically state it, how little of it is nature-woman, and how
much is hoop-civilization. To those, again, who object, that it is too
primitive, we would reply, that the highest civilization is always a
return to Nature, which is likewise exemplified by many of our ladies in
the ball-room,--we mean by their upper portion.

But _revenons a nos moutons_. The Rev. Messrs. Williams and Calvert,
missionaries, for many long years, among the Fijians, state, in their
recently published work, that those unsophisticated children of Nature
eat "long pig,"--as they call, with graceful humor, roast-man, in
contradistinction to "short-pig," by which they designate our squealing
fellow-roasters,