Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/283

1866.] years past I have abstained from the use of all the diffusible stimulants, using no animal food, either flesh, fish, or fowl, nor any alcoholic or vinous spirits, no form of ale, beer, or porter, no cider, tea, or coffee; but using milk and water as my only liquid aliment, and feeding sparingly, or rather moderately, upon farinaceous food, vegetables, and fruit, seasoned with unmelted butter, slightly boiled eggs, and sugar and molasses, with no condiment but common salt."

These ultra-temperance dietetical philosophers never flourished greatly. They were too languid and too little enthusiastic to propagate their rules of living and make converts. In a country where meat is within reach of all, a vegetable dietary is not popular. Doubtless a less frequent use of fleshly food would be greatly to our advantage as a people. But utter abstinence is out of the question. A vegetable diet, however, has great authorities in its favor, both ancient and modern. Plautus, Plutarch, Porphyry of Tyre, Lord Bacon, Sir William Temple, Cicero, Cyrus the Great, Pope, Newton, and Shelley have all left their testimony in favor of it and of simplicity of living. Poor Shelley, who in his abstract moods forgot even to take vegetable sustenance for days together, makes a furious onslaught upon flesh-eating in his Notes to "Queen Mab." The notes, as well as the poem, are crude productions, the outgivings of a boy; but that boy was Shelley. It was said that he was traceable, in his lonely wanderings in secluded places in Italy, by the crumbs of bread which he let fall. Speculative thinkers have generally been light feeders, eschewing stimulants, both solid and liquid, and preferring mild food and water for drink. Those who lead an interior life sedentary and contemplative need not gross pabulum, but would find their inward joy at the contemplation and discovery of truth seriously qualified and deadened by it. Spare fast is the companion of the ecstatic moods of a high truth-seeker such as Newton, Malebranche, etc. Immanuel Kant was almost the only profound speculative thinker who was decidedly convivial, and given to gulosity, at least at his dinner. Asceticism ordinarily reigns in the cloister and student's bower. The Oxford scholar long ago, as described by Chaucer, was adust and thin.

"As lene was his hors as is a rake, And he was not right fat, I undertake." The ancient anchorets of the East, the children of St. Anthony, were a long-lived sect, rivalling the many-wintered crow in longevity. Yet their lives were vapid monotonies, only long in months and years. They were devoid of vivid sensations, and vegetated merely. Milk-eaters were, in the days of Homer, the longest-lived of men.

Without the ministry of culinary fire, man could not gratify his carnivorous propensities. He would be obliged to content himself with a vegetable diet; for, according to the comparative anatomists, man is not structurally a flesh-eater. At any rate he is not fanged or clawed. His teeth and nails are not like the natural cutlery found in the mouths and paws of beasts of prey. He cannot eat raw flesh. Digger Indians are left to do that when the meat is putrescent. Prometheus was the inventor of roast and boiled beef, and of cookery generally, and therefore the destroyer of the original simplicity of living which characterized primitive man, when milk and fruits cooked by the sun, and acorns, were the standing repasts of unsophisticated humanity. Per contra, Horace makes man, in his mast-eating days, a poor creature.

Don Quixote, however, in his eloquent harangue to the shepherds in the Sierra Morena, took a different view of man during the acorn period. He saw in it the golden age.

There are vast rice-eating populations in China and India, who are a low grade of men, morally and physically. Exceptional cases of longevity, like those of old Parr, Jenkins,