Mn. Davis on the Poetry of the Chinese. iSS 



alone, but there have always existed some absurd prejudices and maxims, 

 not to say positive laws, against an extended consumption of flesh food.* 

 The penal code denounces severe punishments against those who kill their 

 own cattle without an express license.t It is a well known principle, that 

 where tillage exists to a considerable extent, the rent of land reserved for 

 pasture must, in proportion to its goodness, be equal to that of land em- 

 ployed in producing grain ; and this, under a rice cultivation, where three 

 crops per annum are said sometimes to be obtained, must have such an 

 obvious effect in raising the comparative price of meat, as must necessarily 

 discourage its consumption among so frugal a people as the Chinese, even 

 without the intervention of any positive law. There is accordingly no 

 people in the world (the Hindoos t always excepted), that consumes so little 

 meat, or so much fish and vegetable food — nor, again, is there any country 

 in which fewer cattle are employed for the purposes of draft and burthen. 

 Where every institution tends so fatally to keep a population up to the very 

 utmost limits of a bare subsistence, and where neither pride nor prejudice 

 steps in between the labourer and his work, human exertion naturally sup- 

 plants every other. In the southern parts of the empire, therefore, beasts 

 of carriage and draft, with the exception of a few miserable riding horses, 

 and a few buffaloes for ploughing, are nearly unknown. Towards Peking, 

 and the uncultivated borders of Tartary, the case becomes altered : but the 

 Great Wall may still be considered, generally, as the boundary which sepa- 

 rates two people, one of them exclusively pastoral, and the other as exclu- 

 sively tillers of the earth. 



Tiie esteem in which the business of tillage is held, may be expected to 

 have rendered it the subject of poetical celebration : and we find the praises 

 of fertile fields sung in such strains as the following. Years of dearth 

 they term ' years of nothingness.' 



• See a long paper, ' Sur I'usage de la viande en Chine.' M^moires, T. xi. 



t Book iv. sect. 233. 



I Bishop Heber's Journal proves that the Hindoos themselves are not so scrupulous as they 

 have been supposed. They consume milk, too, which the Chinese, strange to say, never 

 think of. 



